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3232Can the gene editing technology known as CRISPR help reduce biodiversity loss worldwide?https://ensia.com/features/crispr-biodiversity-coral-food-agriculture-invasive-species/
https://ensia.com/features/crispr-biodiversity-coral-food-agriculture-invasive-species/#respondFri, 13 Sep 2019 17:13:09 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26971It’s been an alarming year for the world’s outlook on biodiversity. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) put the world on notice that around 1 million species are facing extinction. A study published in August concluded that it would take New Zealand 50 million years to recover the diversity of bird species it has lost since human colonization. And, while headlines about an insect apocalypse may have been hyperbolic, insect biodiversity is decreasing, and it’s a problem. As evidenced in the IPBES report, current conservation efforts have not been sufficient to stem biodiversity loss, so innovative solutions might be necessary to support the web of life that supports human existence. In 2012, scientists first described the gene editing capabilities of CRISPR, a molecular tool that can be used to make targeted, precise changes to the DNA of plants, animals and microbes. Since then, scientists have proposed myriad ways to use the technology. But could it be a boon to biodiversity? Can it help researchers understand and preserve corals and their ecosystems? What about applications to diversify agriculture to shore up food security? Or to combat invasive species plaguing ecosystems around the world? While many scientists are eager to discuss the possibilities of using CRISPR to preserve biodiversity, they are also cautious. The effects of human interventions are not always predictable, and once a gene-edited species is released into the wild, controlling any negative effects will be difficult. Toni Piaggio, a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Wildlife Research Center, says researchers should “never entirely sip the Kool-Aid” when it comes to CRISPR. Instead, she says, they should “spend a lot of research time and intellectual energy” questioning themselves and their work. Posing the right questions to the right stakeholders — including communities that would be affected by the application of gene editing — might help to avoid the unintended consequences that so often accompany human solutions to ecosystem challenges. Diversity for Food Security About 12,000 years ago, ancient people began cultivating the wild ancestors of many of the plants we eat today.… Read More

As evidenced in the IPBES report, current conservation efforts have not been sufficient to stem biodiversity loss, so innovative solutions might be necessary to support the web of life that supports human existence. In 2012, scientists first described the gene editing capabilities of CRISPR, a molecular tool that can be used to make targeted, precise changes to the DNA of plants, animals and microbes. Since then, scientists have proposed myriad ways to use the technology. But could it be a boon to biodiversity? Can it help researchers understand and preserve corals and their ecosystems? What about applications to diversify agriculture to shore up food security? Or to combat invasive species plaguing ecosystems around the world?

While many scientists are eager to discuss the possibilities of using CRISPR to preserve biodiversity, they are also cautious. The effects of human interventions are not always predictable, and once a gene-edited species is released into the wild, controlling any negative effects will be difficult. Toni Piaggio, a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Wildlife Research Center, says researchers should “never entirely sip the Kool-Aid” when it comes to CRISPR. Instead, she says, they should “spend a lot of research time and intellectual energy” questioning themselves and their work. Posing the right questions to the right stakeholders — including communities that would be affected by the application of gene editing — might help to avoid the unintended consequences that so often accompany human solutions to ecosystem challenges.

But as millennia passed, domestication also decreased the genetic diversitywithin the plants we grow and eat. To understand why, imagine an ancient human 10,000 years ago, tired of smashing teosinte with rocks to get a few measly kernels out of their hard casings. If that person saw a plant with naked kernels — exposed and available to eat without rock smashing — they might select seeds from that plant to grow the next year. That works out great for the person, but the genetic diversity in the rest of the field is lost to future generations.

Domestication of plants like tomatoes, rice and corn helped increase crop yields and make farming more predictable. But it also reduced genetic diversity — something that could be a problem with more erratic weather in the future. Image courtesy of Markus G. Stetter, Daniel J. Gates, Wenbin Mei, Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra via Current Biology, Volume 27, Issue 17; “How to make a domesticate”; Pages R896-R900 Licensed under Elsevier user license

The same forces are at play today. When each tomato plant, for example, looks the same, grows at the same rate, and produces pounds upon pounds of tomatoes, farming is easier and the food supply is more predictable — if everything goes as usual.

Problem is, farming doesn’t always follow usual, expected patterns. And climate change is increasing variability and unpredictability in agriculture. Many crops, as a result of their low genetic diversity, are not particularly well suited to cope with emerging climate patterns, leaving them susceptible to challenges like drought, flooding or salty soils. So, says Lázaro Peres, a professor of plant physiology at the University of São Paulo, relying on a limited number of crop species to produce the world’s food is risky.

Peres and other researchers are trying to infuse agriculture with the genetic diversity of wild species. His research team started with a wild tomato and used CRISPR to edit a handful of key genes. Their goal was to make the versions of the genes in wild tomato look like the versions of the genes in domesticated tomato. In doing so, the wild tomato species gained some beneficial characteristics common to domesticated species. Through this process, called “de novo domestication,” Peres and colleagues produced a tomato with more fruit, bigger fruit and more lycopene than wild tomatoes and that are genetically diverse from conventional domesticated tomatoes.

Such diversity, they say, might mean that farmers coping with various climatic stresses will have access to domesticated tomato species suited to the unique challenges they face.

But, looking beyond a single crop into the ecosystem within which it exists is important, says Yolanda Chen, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Vermont. Chen studies the impact plant domestication can have on insect populations. She says that researchers need to consider how genes “operate within a broader community context” and not just in a single plant. Does a change in plant size or color affect which insects are attracted to it? How does that affect the predators of those insects?

Peres is mindful of the potential effects on agricultural ecosystems. Domesticating a wild tomato and growing it at scale could impact nuanced ecological relationships. Still, he says, he “sees mainly positive things” about the potential impacts of his work. “And one of the things is food security, because it is quite dangerous to depend on very few species for our food, feed and fiber.”

Chen says that she thinks gene editing for de novo domestication is “less risky” than other genetic approaches, such as those that introduce entire new genes into a plant species. In de novo domestication, the edited versions of genes already exist in related domesticated tomato plants.

It will likely be a while before a new species of tomato developed to increase the genetic diversity of our food is available at the local grocery store. Peres says the work he and his group have published so far was a proof of concept; in other words, they showed that de novo domestication is feasible, but have no plan to commercialize that tomato. They’ve since turned their attention to a species of wild tomato from the Galápagos Islands that grows especially well in salty soils and is resistant to a white fly that can cause severe crop damage. If they are able to de novo domesticate this tomato, it could be used as an important crop for farmers dealing with salty, coastal soils.

In the end, Chen and Peres are both concerned about climate change, agriculture and biodiversity. They approach solutions to these concerns from different research perspectives, but both see diversity — on the genetic and species levels — in agricultural ecosystems as an important aspect of a food system that can withstand the challenges of climate change. In the future, domesticating new plant species — potentially with gene editing — might give farmers more options for growing diverse crops well-suited to specific climates.

Coral Conservation

In 1770, British explorer Captain James Cook ran his ship, The Endeavor, aground on the “insane labyrinth” that would become known as the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia. While Cook was credited with “discovering” the reef, coral reefs had been important to indigenous people for centuries before.

Current conservation efforts for the world’s corals have been insufficient to curb bleaching events and sustain the valuable ecosystems corals support, according to the IPBES report. So there is a certain urgency to finding new approaches to conservation. A 2019 report by biologists laid out different conservation approaches and evaluated their potential risks and benefits. And with the 2018 announcement that scientists have used CRISPR to edit genes in coral, gene editing is seen as a potential strategy. Maybe.

Conservation scientists, Piaggio says, are “just as concerned about the technology as anyone that I’ve ever met or talked to about it.” Scientists using gene editing on corals are no exception. In fact, they are quite clear: They are not using gene editing to make heat-resistant corals to populate the ocean. Their intent is to use CRISPR to understand, in a laboratory setting, which coral genes are important for handling stress in the environment and use that information to help other coral conservation efforts.

Marie Strader, now an assistant research professor at Auburn University, was a lead researcher as a graduate student on the international team of scientists that produced the work. The scientists edited three types of genes in a vibrantly colored coral called Acropora millepora. The goal of the editing was to “break” or mutate the genes, and in some of the larvae, it did.

Since this proof-of-concept study was successful — meaning they were able to edit the coral genes they targeted at least some of the time — other researchers can use their methods as a blueprint for editing other genes in Acropora millepora and editing other coral species. For starters, Strader says, they’ll likely be looking at genes involved in the coral life cycle and temperature sensitivity. Understanding those processes, Strader says, can “translate into conservation efforts down the line.”

For example, researchers can use CRISPR in the lab to help them understand which genes are important for tolerance to warm waters. If they edit a gene in the lab and the resulting coral can better tolerate warm waters, then, according to Strader, the scientists could look at natural coral populations for those that naturally have that genetic mutation. Armed with that understanding, researchers might be more successful at conservation efforts such as breeding corals to help them keep their cool as the heat turns up.

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So why don’t scientists want to populate the ocean with heat-tolerant, CRISPRed corals?

For one thing, there are still plenty of technical obstacles. In Strader’s work, individual edited corals ended up with a mix of edited and unedited copies of the genes. To realize the full effect of a gene edit and to pass it down to future generations, each cell of the coral should ideally have the same edit. And other details, such as making sure CRISPR edits only the targeted gene or genes, “need to be worked out before it would be a viable option for conservation purposes,” Strader says.

Furthermore, says John Bruno, a marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conservation efforts need to protect not just corals but also the thousands of other species that rely on them. According to Bruno, gene editing 10 or 20 species of corals to tolerate warm water just isn’t enough. Since “nobody’s going to CRISPR all billion species that are in the ocean,” he says, conservation needs to focus on the whole ecosystem and not just a few species. “The solution is rather obvious, just radically mitigate greenhouse gas emissions,” he says — acknowledging that’s no easy feat.

Running Interference

The situation with corals is “dire,” according to Bruno. But even in coral species that have seen precipitous declines, there are often still many — potentially on the order of millions — of individuals left, he says.

Back on shore, some animal populations are much smaller and could easily slip out of existence under the thumb of invasive species. In New Zealand, native birds evolved without mammalian predators. Many are large and flightless, so when mammals like rats, possums and stoats arrived with humans, the birds were easy targets. According to one study, these invasive animals are responsible for the loss of an estimated 26.6 million chicks and eggs of native bird species each year.

“So many things have been done with the best possible intention, and we find that there’s just been unforeseen consequences,” says Helen Taylor, a conservation geneticist and honorary research fellow at the University of Otago. She points out that while possums are pests in New Zealand, they are an important species in Australia. If a possum with the New Zealand gene drive were somehow released in Australia, the effects could be devastating.

Maud Quinzin, a conservation geneticist and senior postdoctoral associate, recently began working in MIT’s Sculpting Evolution Lab with Kevin Esvelt, the scientist who first proposed CRISPR as a tool to create gene drives. Quinzin is using her understanding of ecosystem dynamics to help the Sculpting Evolution Lab think about the complex rippling effects of human interference in ecosystems.

It’s important to look at the science from all angles, she says. “Developing gene-editing tools requires scientists with very different expertise sharing ideas and progress from early on in the process.” For example, if an invasive rat species is eradicated from an island, will other species — even other invasive species — become more populous? “You have to think about … the dynamic in that ecosystem,” she says. Since suggesting that CRISPR could be used for gene drives, Esvelt himself has been vocal about his concerns.

Still, Quinzin has been on the front lines of conservation biology, watching populations of valued species go extinct, and she wants communities to be presented with all options for conservation. For scientists to present those options, though, they really need to understand the places where they might work, Quinzin says. That understanding comes not just from researchers, but also from the people who live in those places. “It is really important that you respect the values and the knowledge in a place,” Quinzin says, including “not only the scientific information but also the indigenous or local knowledge.” By engaging with local communities as technology develops, Quinzin says, researchers can focus on developing technology in ways that align with a community’s cultural, social, political and environmental values.

Moving Forward

In the short term, agriculture might be the most likely use of CRISPR to protect biodiversity. In fact, the first gene-edited crop hit the market in the United States in early 2019. Individual countries are still figuring out how to regulate edited plants, with a big distinction being made between plants that could have emerged through natural mutations and plants containing larger edits, like those containing new DNA.

At the very least, the work of scientists like Peres could expand the genetic diversity of our crop plants, adding more options to the table as farmers, scientists and other stakeholders work toward a food-secure world. And having options is important. No single solution can save biodiversity everywhere. And carelessly applied solutions can cause more problems.

Scientists do seem to be proceeding with caution. At least some coral researchers decline to consider using CRISPR in the wild. Scientists studying gene drives are vocally pointing out the limitations of the technology and extolling the role nonscientists must play in the decisions to use or not use CRISPR for conservation purposes.

“I think we have a really big — not just opportunity, but an obligation to get it out there in the public eye as much as possible,” Piaggio says. And if scientists don’t get public buy-in, they shouldn’t use the technology, she says. “I think we have to be okay with that.”

Quinzin says that she and other scientists in her group want guidance from the public. At the same time, she notes that CRISPR “could be such an amazing tool if we are respectful [and] responsible and use it properly.”

There are no perfect or universal solutions to the biodiversity crisis the world is facing. And the causes cannot be forgotten in pursuit of an antidote. That’s why it will take scientists and conservationists with diverse approaches working in different areas to make a difference.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/crispr-biodiversity-coral-food-agriculture-invasive-species/feed/0Becky MackelprangThis interactive map shows how diverse life on Earth is — and how we can keep it that wayhttps://ensia.com/notable/biodiversity-map-half-earth/
https://ensia.com/notable/biodiversity-map-half-earth/#commentsTue, 10 Sep 2019 15:23:24 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26935The astronomer Carl Sagan famously referred to Earth as a “pale blue dot” against the dark backdrop of space. Our planet is blue, yes, but also green — teeming with life, from preening birds to leafing trees to fleeting microbes. Down but not out, living organisms span the globe in immense diversity, and meaningful action could make a difference in their conservation. That’s the message of the Half-Earth Project Map. Spearheaded by the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, the interactive map was created by the design firm Vizzuality with data drawn mostly from the Map of Life. By clicking on various element options, users can explore the diversity of life on land and at sea and discover where various groups as broad as mammals and as narrow as hummingbirds are common and rare. Other maps depict the human pressures that threaten living organisms by destroying habitat and areas currently devoted to conservation. From a drop-down menu on the left side of the screen, users can click to map the geographic range of birds, mammals, amphibians, marine fish and other living things. This biodiversity data comes in two flavors: “Richness” describes how many species inhabit an area, while “rarity” pinpoints just how unique an organism is to any particular place. A drop-down for human impacts can reveal where farms and cities place pressure on the biosphere. Users also can look at a menu for “existing protection” to see which parts of the planet are covered by conservation areas. Users can glean new insights by layering data on top of each other — for example, by mapping the locations of protected conservation areas over a display of biodiversity. Most of the data are global, so the map can’t show much detail when zoomed in. But one of the project’s stated goals is to chart the geographic distribution of organisms “at high enough resolution to drive decision-making” on how to best protect the highest number of species. To showcase the potential for more precise information, the Half-Earth Project includes options to map high-resolution ranges for a handful of animals and plants. One map displays the species diversity… Read More

The astronomer Carl Sagan famously referred to Earth as a “pale blue dot” against the dark backdrop of space.

Our planet is blue, yes, but also green — teeming with life, from preening birds to leafing trees to fleeting microbes. Down but not out, living organisms span the globe in immense diversity, and meaningful action could make a difference in their conservation.

By clicking on various element options, users can explore the diversity of life on land and at sea and discover where various groups as broad as mammals and as narrow as hummingbirds are common and rare. Other maps depict the human pressures that threaten living organisms by destroying habitat and areas currently devoted to conservation.

From a drop-down menu on the left side of the screen, users can click to map the geographic range of birds, mammals, amphibians, marine fish and other living things. This biodiversity data comes in two flavors: “Richness” describes how many species inhabit an area, while “rarity” pinpoints just how unique an organism is to any particular place.

A drop-down for human impacts can reveal where farms and cities place pressure on the biosphere. Users also can look at a menu for “existing protection” to see which parts of the planet are covered by conservation areas.

Users can glean new insights by layering data on top of each other — for example, by mapping the locations of protected conservation areas over a display of biodiversity.

Most of the data are global, so the map can’t show much detail when zoomed in. But one of the project’s stated goals is to chart the geographic distribution of organisms “at high enough resolution to drive decision-making” on how to best protect the highest number of species.

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To showcase the potential for more precise information, the Half-Earth Project includes options to map high-resolution ranges for a handful of animals and plants. One map displays the species diversity and rarity of hummingbirds across North and South America at a resolution of 1 square kilometer (0.4 square miles), meaning that users can zoom much closer to Earth’s surface before the map starts to appear blotchy or blocky.

The Half-Earth Project is a campaign to increase the portion of Earth’s terrestrial and marine area covered by conservation commitments. Globally, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, protected areas cover around 15% of land and 7% of oceans. The Half-Earth campaign’s goal is to raise those numbers to 50%.

That call, associated with movements like Nature Needs Half, was promoted by famed biologist (and Half-Earth Project lead scientist) E. O. Wilson in his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. The ambitious target has been hailed by scientists who say it’s necessary to halt “massive displacement of other species.” Critics, however, contend that the 50% goal ignores needed economic changes and, with conservation’s typical focus on low-income tropical countries, could spur the displacement of “communities that are poorest and least responsible for our current environmental predicament.”

Whatever the solution, the problem of species extinctions remains real, and the Half-Earth Map offers one more way to see that problem — and think about how we might create a better future.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/biodiversity-map-half-earth/feed/1Andrew UrevigThis crop is helping us understand humanity’s nomadic past — and prepare for a hotter, drier futurehttps://ensia.com/articles/this-crop-is-helping-us-understand-humanitys-nomadic-past-and-prepare-for-a-hotter-drier-future/
https://ensia.com/articles/this-crop-is-helping-us-understand-humanitys-nomadic-past-and-prepare-for-a-hotter-drier-future/#commentsFri, 06 Sep 2019 19:32:07 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=articles&p=26915Imagine spending three weeks outside without water while temperatures regularly rise above 40 °C (104 °F). That’s a recipe for disaster for humans — and for most plants, too. But to many varieties of cowpea, it’s a mere hiccup on the way to producing high-protein, nutritious beans that have cultural significance around the world. Ousmane Boukar, a cowpea breeder at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria, is working to understand how cowpeas withstand such brutal droughts. That’s important because regions of West Africa, where Boukar says that most people eat cowpea practically every day, are expected to get drier and hotter with climate change. For food security and economic stability, growers will need varieties that can withstand those changes. Along with other scientists, Boukar is using emerging information about cowpea genetics to better understand how the crop responds to drought — and how we might make it even more tolerant. While cowpeas have a reputation for tolerating drought, individual varieties differ greatly. If researchers find that varieties that thrive under dry conditions all have the same mutation in one gene, they can investigate that gene to learn how — or if — it affects drought tolerance, then breed it into other varieties to make them more tolerant, too. Ira Herniter, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside, is one of those other scientists investigating the genetics of cowpea. He’s using similarities and differences in the genetic makeup of plants in addition to archaeological evidence and old texts from around the world to piece together the history of the crop’s diverse varieties and their dispersal around the globe. He and his advisor, UC-Riverside plant geneticist Timothy Close, say that understanding this history is important for protecting the diversity of the cowpea today and for improving our ability to breed varieties well-suited to specific conditions in the future. Herniter says that domesticated cowpeas spread from West Africa to East Africa. These East African domesticated varieties were taken to South Africa where they interbred with that region’s native cowpeas. They were transported up the Nile River into Egypt by… Read More

Imagine spending three weeks outside without water while temperatures regularly rise above 40 °C (104 °F). That’s a recipe for disaster for humans — and for most plants, too. But to many varieties of cowpea, it’s a mere hiccup on the way to producing high-protein, nutritious beans that have cultural significance around the world.

Ousmane Boukar, a cowpea breeder at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria, is working to understand how cowpeas withstand such brutal droughts. That’s important because regions of West Africa, where Boukar says that most people eat cowpea practically every day, are expected to get drier and hotter with climate change. For food security and economic stability, growers will need varieties that can withstand those changes.

Along with other scientists, Boukar is using emerging information about cowpea genetics to better understand how the crop responds to drought — and how we might make it even more tolerant. While cowpeas have a reputation for tolerating drought, individual varieties differ greatly. If researchers find that varieties that thrive under dry conditions all have the same mutation in one gene, they can investigate that gene to learn how — or if — it affects drought tolerance, then breed it into other varieties to make them more tolerant, too.

Ira Herniter, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside, is one of those other scientists investigating the genetics of cowpea. He’s using similarities and differences in the genetic makeup of plants in addition to archaeological evidence and old texts from around the world to piece together the history of the crop’s diverse varieties and their dispersal around the globe. He and his advisor, UC-Riverside plant geneticist Timothy Close, say that understanding this history is important for protecting the diversity of the cowpea today and for improving our ability to breed varieties well-suited to specific conditions in the future.

Dry cowpea production, 2017. Click to enlarge

Herniter says that domesticated cowpeas spread from West Africa to East Africa. These East African domesticated varieties were taken to South Africa where they interbred with that region’s native cowpeas. They were transported up the Nile River into Egypt by about 2500 BC and, from there, into the Mediterranean Basin. And they were taken east to Arabia, where tradespeople carried them to India. From India, they spread east to China, where selective breeding led to bean pods 50–90 centimeters (2–3 feet) long.

Cowpeas came to the Americas more recently, in the 16th or 17th centuries AD, where indigenous peoples quickly incorporated them as a staple food. In the U.S. today, a type of cowpea called black-eyed pea is both a valuable source of protein and a cultural icon.

Cowpea production has declined in the U.S. in recent decades. But with drought caused by climate change and depleted aquifers leaving farmlands in regions of India, the U.S., Africa and elsewhere high and dry, Close thinks the time is right to bring cowpeas back in vogue — and he’s doing his part.

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He recently helped sequence the cowpea genome, making it easier for researchers to determine the genetic underpinnings of specific traits, including drought tolerance. For instance, Boukar’s team screened over 1,000 cowpea lines to identify those with the highest drought tolerance. They selected the 10 varieties that performed best for further breeding. The genome sequence of cowpea could make it easier for Boukar’s team to figure out which genes — or combinations of genes — in those 10 varieties contribute to drought tolerance, helping breeders maximize the number of genes for drought tolerance in new varieties.

Herniter says that because less research has been done on cowpeas than on crops like rice and soybean, “many of the large leaps” in breeding have not yet been taken. That means potentially more bang for the research buck in terms of advancing crop productivity and food security.

With the genome now sequenced, we might be hearing lots more about not only cowpea’s past but also its future in the months and years ahead.

]]>https://ensia.com/articles/this-crop-is-helping-us-understand-humanitys-nomadic-past-and-prepare-for-a-hotter-drier-future/feed/1Becky MackelprangOpinion: The Sustainable Development Goals could use a boost — and these five strategies might be just what’s neededhttps://ensia.com/voices/sustainable-development-goals/
https://ensia.com/voices/sustainable-development-goals/#commentsWed, 04 Sep 2019 17:30:11 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=voices&p=26871Ours is an age of abundant knowledge. The scientific community has leveraged the connectivity of modern technologies to rapidly spread messages across the world and open new spheres of inquiry. Among other things, this has enabled scientists to forecast climate trends over the decades ahead. The quest for sustainable development will not fail due to lack of knowledge but rather lack of action. Translating knowledge into action is, however, no easy task. Spinning theories is one thing; putting hard-won insights into practice is another. This is especially evident in the case of climate change. The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has given us a road map for moving from knowledge to action in the form of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs have proven beneficial, but they also pose complex and demanding challenges. Not enough has happened to implement them. Concrete actions are rare. Effective pathways are still missing — and people are taking to the streets to protest because politicians are not responding with urgency. The results of the European elections last May reveal a growing desire among Europeans, and especially younger people, for more and better measures to protect the environment and for a swifter transition toward a more sustainable society. At the same time, populations in mining districts are fearful of what the future might bring and are fighting to protect fossil energy industries. How should we, as a society, deal with these conflicts? The how, when and why of all these issues has been the focus of 17 sustainability scientists who came together at the first Global Sustainability Strategy Forum (GSSF) held in Potsdam, Germany, in March 2019. The group was composed of people — including me — from six continents and 12 nations from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, all striving to figure out how to change our existing strategies to better achieve the SDGs. Here’s what we came up with: 1. Take It Step by Step Rather than focusing on long-term objectives and waiting for a turning point that might never come, we need to set our sights… Read More

Ours is an age of abundant knowledge. The scientific community has leveraged the connectivity of modern technologies to rapidly spread messages across the world and open new spheres of inquiry. Among other things, this has enabled scientists to forecast climate trends over the decades ahead. The quest for sustainable development will not fail due to lack of knowledge but rather lack of action.

Translating knowledge into action is, however, no easy task. Spinning theories is one thing; putting hard-won insights into practice is another.

This is especially evident in the case of climate change.The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has given us a road map for moving from knowledge to action in the form of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs have proven beneficial, but they also pose complex and demanding challenges. Not enough has happened to implement them. Concrete actions are rare. Effective pathways are still missing — and people are taking to the streets to protest because politicians are not responding with urgency.

The results of the European elections last May reveal a growing desire among Europeans, and especially younger people, for more and better measures to protect the environment and for a swifter transition toward a more sustainable society. At the same time, populations in mining districts are fearful of what the future might bring and are fighting to protect fossil energy industries. How should we, as a society, deal with these conflicts?

The how, when and why of all these issues has been the focus of 17 sustainability scientists who came together at the first Global Sustainability Strategy Forum (GSSF) held in Potsdam, Germany, in March 2019. The group was composed of people — including me — from six continents and 12 nations from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, all striving to figure out how to change our existing strategies to better achieve the SDGs. Here’s what we came up with:

1. Take It Step by Step

Rather than focusing on long-term objectives and waiting for a turning point that might never come, we need to set our sights on feasible near-future goals and take small steps to achieve them.

There is a tendency in policymaking to postulate very ambitious goals for the far future to compensate for lack of action in the present. This allows us to avoid unpopular decisions but still give the impatient audience the assurance that something drastic will be done in the future. To actually achieve the SDGs, we should be making plans to run short sprints in the coming years rather than constantly revising our training schedule for an ultramarathon that will last well into the middle of this century.

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Step-by-step progress unfolds as a process of continuous and dynamic learning. What has been achieved? Where are new conflicts arising? How can unintended side effects be cushioned? By taking small steps continuously and persistently, we will get closer and closer to reaching our ultimate destination.

2. Think Regional, Not Global

Similarly, we must begin to think in terms of regional rather than global contexts. A global scope is too abstract. It slows processes and saps momentum. Global actions take time in a weak global governance system and, even more important, do not take into account the special regional conditions and contexts that need to be considered when actions need to be effective.

3. Strategically Balance Conflicting Objectives

Measures that benefit the environment do not necessarily offer economic, social or cultural benefits. Nevertheless, the preservation of the ecological foundations of life is a prerequisite for the implementation of economic and social goals and must be prioritized. We need to keep conflicting policy objectives in our sights and make sure we strive for the most critical first, but at the least expense to others.

Of course, every policy in a situation of conflicting values and objectives faces painful trade-offs. There will be winners and losers. But the benefits of transformation must extend to those affected by loss. A society built on the principle of solidarity does not abandon its citizens.

4. Work From the Bottom Up

Transformations toward sustainability cannot be imposed from above, prescribed by scientists, or squeezed out of society by nongovernmental organizations. They must be initiated and implemented by the very people who will experience their effects — individually and collectively — in the social and cultural contexts in which they live and work.

Throughout an iterative process of learning and change, science can offer valuable guidance and assess the possible effects and side-effects of measures in advance. But it cannot simply prescribe solutions. Those affected are best placed to do so.

They need help, of course — the challenges we face are complex and difficult to understand. But they also need to be in the drivers’ seat, not participating as passive passengers.

5. Use Stories to Drive Change

Science matters, but stories matter as much because they carry the science to the people who can use it. Scientific findings and models play an important role in telling us what we need to do, but that will be the end of the story unless we develop narratives together with those affected and then integrate these narratives within the policymaking process.

People ask themselves why they should change their lives and why they should go through the pain of continuous learning and adapting their lifestyles. Abstract models, whatever their scientific value, cannot provide satisfactory answers. The answers that people need to hear are woven — implicitly and often explicitly — within narratives.

Such narratives are particularly effective when they are told not as tales of cataclysmic horror but as stories of opportunity that portray a better and fulfilling future for all, in which ecological, economic and social concerns can indeed be reconciled.

Next Steps

The key message to emerge from this year’s GSSF is: We can’t wait for a global revolution.

Instead, we must begin today by taking action, step by step and around the world, to preserve the foundations of life for all. And we must do so in a way that is led by the people who are affected. Science should not pretend to have all of the answers. Instead, it should facilitate and support the development of narratives that promise a future that is meaningful and affords everyone a high quality of life within their respective cultural context.

A second forum will take place in 2020 and focus on the regional impacts of the SDGs. How can policymakers and practitioners take different economic, cultural, institutional, historical, social and geographical circumstances into account as they work toward achieving these goals? And how can we advance the implementation of sustainable development strategies?

By focusing on regional implementation we are not abandoning the global perspective. We are “thinking locally and acting locally” in awareness of the global impacts in a world in which all the spheres of life are interconnected.

Editor’s note: The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily of Ensia. We present ​them to further discussion around important topics. ​We encourage you to respond with a comment below following our commenting guidelines, which can be found on this page. ​In addition, you might consider​ ​submitting a Voices piece of your own. See Ensia’s Contact page for submission guidelines.

]]>https://ensia.com/voices/sustainable-development-goals/feed/1Ortwin RennClean energy technology is taking cues from sunflower spirals, schooling fish and other natural phenomenahttps://ensia.com/articles/clean-energy-technology-wind-solar-biomimicry/
https://ensia.com/articles/clean-energy-technology-wind-solar-biomimicry/#respondThu, 29 Aug 2019 15:59:46 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=articles&p=26839When we think about renewable energy, we think of rolling fields with windmills or industrial rooftops covered in silicon solar panels designed by human engineers in high-tech labs. As engineers work to make energy systems more efficient and affordable, some are finding inspiration in nature. Organisms and natural systems have had some 3.8 billion years to evolve. Because energy is the currency of life, in the process they have come up with energy-efficient ways to function. From more productive wind turbines to strategic solar arrays, there’s a lot we can learn from nature about improving energy production and use. For example, scientists at Cornell studying the movements insect wings make as the insects hover found that the wingtips trace out figure-eight patterns, minimizing power consumption. Such energy-saving kinematics could help improve the efficiency of miniature unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) used for surveillance. The idea of imitating nature to design machines is not new. Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter was inspired by the flapping wings of birds, although it never actually took flight. From bridges and buildings to water management and food distribution, other examples of biomimicry abound in today’s world. Now, as renewable energy grows in popularity, scientists and engineers are looking to nature for insights into designing wind, marine and solar energy devices in a way that increases efficiency and reduces environmental impact. Solar Spirals In July 2016, a solar-powered airplane flying over the desert region of Andalusia in Spain photographed breathtaking images of the Gemasolar concentrated solar power plant. The plant, operated by Torresol Energy, consists of 2,650 heliostats — mirrors that turn to track the motion of the sun, fanning out around, and reflecting sunlight toward, a 150-meter (490-foot)-high tower. The central tower houses molten salts that can store the energy of that light for extended periods of time. In a fascinating article published in Solar Energy in 2012, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and RWTH Aachen University in Germany reported that the placement of heliostats for a concentrated solar plant like Gemasolar could be optimized by mimicking the spiral arrangement of florets in a sunflower. This… Read More

When we think about renewable energy, we think of rolling fields with windmills or industrial rooftops covered in silicon solar panels designed by human engineers in high-tech labs. As engineers work to make energy systems more efficient and affordable, some are finding inspiration in nature.

Organisms and natural systems have had some 3.8 billion years to evolve. Because energy is the currency of life, in the process they have come up with energy-efficient ways to function. From more productive wind turbines to strategic solar arrays, there’s a lot we can learn from nature about improving energy production and use.

For example, scientists at Cornell studying the movements insect wings make as the insects hover found that the wingtips trace out figure-eight patterns, minimizing power consumption. Such energy-saving kinematics could help improve the efficiency of miniature unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) used for surveillance.

The idea of imitating nature to design machines is not new. Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter was inspired by the flapping wings of birds, although it never actually took flight. From bridges and buildings to water management and food distribution, other examples of biomimicry abound in today’s world.

Now, as renewable energy grows in popularity, scientists and engineers are looking to nature for insights into designing wind, marine and solar energy devices in a way that increases efficiency and reduces environmental impact.

Solar Spirals

In July 2016, a solar-powered airplane flying over the desert region of Andalusia in Spain photographed breathtaking images of the Gemasolar concentrated solar power plant. The plant, operated by Torresol Energy, consists of 2,650 heliostats — mirrors that turn to track the motion of the sun, fanning out around, and reflecting sunlight toward, a 150-meter (490-foot)-high tower. The central tower houses molten salts that can store the energy of that light for extended periods of time.

In a fascinating article published in Solar Energy in 2012, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and RWTH Aachen University in Germany reported that the placement of heliostats for a concentrated solar plant like Gemasolar could be optimized by mimicking the spiral arrangement of florets in a sunflower. This pattern, called Fermat’s spiral, occurs commonly in the arrangement of leaves on stems and florets in flowers.

The researchers found that for a solar plant with a central tower, the efficiency of the heliostats closest to the tower was higher. Hence, arranging them in a Fermat’s spiral pattern would lead to smaller footprints and higher efficiencies for the power plant. The inspiration from sunflowers doesn’t stop there — the researchers also found that angling each heliostat at a “golden angle” of 137.5° with respect to its neighbor would result in less blocking and loss of solar radiation.

Alexander Mitsos, one of the lead researchers on the project, points out that although the biomimetic layout has seen a lot of interest, the Fermat’s spiral pattern has not yet been directly implemented in a commercial concentrated solar power plant. Some CSP plants like the Gemasolar plant do seem to have a spiral pattern. However, “as far as I know, these are not the biomimetic ones,” Mitsos says.

Tapping the Tides

Energy found in waves off the U.S. coast could theoretically supply the equivalent of about 66% of U.S. electricity generation in 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. To tap into the vast potential of the oceans to provide energy, University of Wisconsin computational scientist Jennifer Franck draws inspiration from the flapping flight of insects, birds and bats to design “oscillating hydrofoils” — to extract energy from tides.

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Conventional devices for extracting energy from tidal currents rotate. An oscillating hydrofoil resembles an aircraft wing, but with a symmetrical elliptical cross section that allows for energy harvesting as the tide ebbs and flows. The hydrofoil heaves in response to tidal currents to turn the energy of tides into electrical current. Franck compares this pitching and heaving motion to the fluke of a large whale, except that the animal usually uses this motion for propulsion.

What is it about flapping motion that makes it a good source of power? Franck and her collaborators found that heaving at certain frequencies and pitching at certain amplitudes leads to the generation of a large amount of lift force. Not only that, but because the motion mimics natural movements of fish and aquatic mammals, “we think that it is more friendly for the environment,” Franck says.

The team has shown that this device can be scaled up and can also function well in shallow water. It is currently working to determine optimum placement of components.

“My sense is that if we can develop an optimum array configuration of these flapping foil devices, it would generate enough energy per square foot to make it competitive with wind and solar energy,” Franck says.

Inspired by Mud

Reza Alam, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, found his inspiration for reducing the cost of marine energy in a rather unlikely place — mud.

“Mud can take up a huge amount of energy from ocean waves,” says Alam. In the coastal state of Kerala in southwest India, he notes, the rivers bring abundant mud to the shoreline during the monsoons. The mud absorbs energy from waves, calming the water, attracting fish and giving local fisherman a bountiful catch.

“If mud can do such a great job in harnessing energy from ocean waves, why don’t we design something that behaves like mud, and responds to the action of waves passing over it?” he asks.

In a laboratory testing facility, an artificial seafloor “carpet” whose design was inspired by the behavior of mud transforms wave energy into hydraulic pressure. Photo courtesy of the Theoretical and Applied Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at UC Berkeley

Taking inspiration from this phenomenon, Alam and his team designed an artificial seafloor “carpet” that absorbs energy as the mud does, then turns it into useful power. Potential applications include powering offshore aquaculture and seawater desalination.

“In California alone, an average of 35 kilowatts of energy per meter of coastline come towards the coast from the ocean,” Alam says. “This means that every meter of California coast can power seven houses with the device operating at 20% efficiency, which is conservative.”

The team is currently testing different materials and configurations in a wave tank to figure out what works best in different environments, such as rocky or muddy shores. A former graduate student from Alam’s lab, Marcus Lehmann, started a company called CalWave Power Technologies that works on an anchored wave energy technology inspired by the seafloor carpet concept.

Conventional wind farms employ horizontal axis wind turbines, which spin at right angles to the wind much as windmills did on the farms of yesteryear. While individual horizontal axis turbines operate at high efficiencies, the turbines need to be spaced far apart so that the airflow patterns generated by one turbine do not interfere with the performance of neighboring turbines. To tackle this issue, Dabiri’s team turned to vertical-axis wind turbines instead.

Swimming fish create patterns of water movement in their wake that resemble the patterns of airflow generated behind wind turbines. Rather than being inhibited by these flow patterns, neighboring fish actually utilize them to enhance and coordinate their swimming as constructive interference of flows between neighbors minimizes the “drag,” or resistance to airflow. (If you’ve ever drafted a truck while driving or another rider while bicycling, you’ve experienced the phenomenon yourself.)

Dabiri’s team used this fish-schooling pattern to inspire wind farm design for optimal energy harvesting. Rather than following the conventional horizontal-axis approach and spacing turbines far apart, they placed vertical-axis turbines in close proximity.

They found that if neighboring turbines are staggered and rotate in opposite directions, the alteration of wind speed and direction by adjacent turbines can actually be beneficial for collective performance of the wind farm. In fact, the team’s studies at the California Institute of Technology’s Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy (FLOWE) found that the power generated per unit area can be almost 10 times greater at high wind speeds compared with that for modern horizontal axis turbine farms.

Commercialization Challenge

It certainly appears that biomimicry has plenty to offer efforts to improve the efficiency and economics of renewable energy. However, a significant impediment seems to be the slow pace of commercialization.

The reasons for this are complex and interwoven. In the case of marine energy, the lack of consolidated test facilities is a concern for scientists, especially because permits for testing in the ocean are hard to obtain. New technologies are tricky to assess without designated test sites and dedicated funding from the government and industry.

Survivability in harsh environments and environmental impact are also major concerns for any clean energy technology.

“The hardware development is inherently slow and expensive,” says Dabiri. “The idea of using biological inspiration is usually attractive, but the hard work is in developing a technology that can function successfully in the real world for a long time.”

In the case of concentrated solar power and wave energy, the limiting factor appears to be economic.

“The idea of using wave energy to generate electricity is not new, and there are thousands of patents with some brilliant ideas out there — and interestingly, for wave energy devices, most of these ideas work,” says Alam. “But the question is, can you generate power that can compete with fossil fuels?”

The jury is out over how many of these bio-inspired technologies will see the light of day. For the sake of the planet, many hope that at least some of them do.

]]>https://ensia.com/articles/clean-energy-technology-wind-solar-biomimicry/feed/0Shweta NarayanHigh-tech weather forecasting aims to bring new hope to Indian farmers facing the devastation of climate changehttps://ensia.com/features/india-weather-stations-farms-climate-resilience/
https://ensia.com/features/india-weather-stations-farms-climate-resilience/#commentsTue, 27 Aug 2019 15:51:50 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26811Shanker Katekar, a 46-year-old farmer in the Indian state of Maharashtra, was discovered lying next to an empty well in the middle of 12 acres (5 hectares) of parched agricultural land. Next to him was a bottle of pesticide and a container he had used to drink it. Declared dead on arrival at a local government hospital, Katekar was one of 14,207 farmers who killed themselves in India in 2011, driven to take his own life by debt and drought. Katekar’s widow, Anjana Katekar, later described to author Kota Neelima how the well had been his last hope after years of deficient rains. When it finally ran dry, as had others on farms across the state, all he had left was loans he saw no way to repay. All told, the National Crime Records Bureau of India recorded 296,438 farmer suicides between 1995 and 2016. A major contributor was crop loss, which in turn has been attributed at least in part to the inability to forecast increasing erratic weather in an accurate and timely way. In response, a private company, Skymet Weather Services, has built one of the world’s largest networks of automated weather stations at extraordinary speed and enlisted corporate clients and public-private partnerships to help farmers predict and prepare for extreme weather. Although it will take some time for awareness and cellphone adoption to spread widely enough to get everyone on board, early signs show great promise for improving rural resilience in the face of a changing climate. Preserve and Prepare Around the world, stronger El Niño weather patterns and climate change are bringing harsher and more frequent droughts — and already-dry India has been particularly hard hit. The acute water shortage has devastated villagers’ agriculture-based livelihoods. Lacking an ability to anticipate changing weather patterns, farmers have continued traditional practices related to crop choice and timing that evolved under former conditions. As a result, crops have died, leaving livestock starving and thirsty. Major crops, including maize, soya, cotton, sweet lime, pulses and groundnuts have withered. And scientists predict that as temperatures continue to rise and populations keep growing,… Read More

Shanker Katekar, a 46-year-old farmer in the Indian state of Maharashtra, was discovered lying next to an empty well in the middle of 12 acres (5 hectares) of parched agricultural land. Next to him was a bottle of pesticide and a container he had used to drink it. Declared dead on arrival at a local government hospital, Katekar was one of 14,207 farmers who killed themselves in India in 2011, driven to take his own life by debt and drought.

Katekar’s widow, Anjana Katekar, later described to author Kota Neelima how the well had been his last hope after years of deficient rains. When it finally ran dry, as had others on farms across the state, all he had left was loans he saw no way to repay.

All told, the National Crime Records Bureau of India recorded 296,438 farmer suicides between 1995 and 2016. A major contributor was crop loss, which in turn has been attributed at least in part to the inability to forecast increasing erratic weather in an accurate and timely way.

In response, a private company, Skymet Weather Services, has built one of the world’s largest networks of automated weather stations at extraordinary speed and enlisted corporate clients and public-private partnerships to help farmers predict and prepare for extreme weather. Although it will take some time for awareness and cellphone adoption to spread widely enough to get everyone on board, early signs show great promise for improving rural resilience in the face of a changing climate.

Preserve and Prepare

Around the world, stronger El Niño weather patterns and climate change are bringing harsher and more frequent droughts — and already-dry India has been particularly hard hit.

SkyMet founder Jatin Singh (left) has led the installation of thousands of stations used to forecast weather across India. Photo courtesy of Jatin Singh

The acute water shortage has devastated villagers’ agriculture-based livelihoods. Lacking an ability to anticipate changing weather patterns, farmers have continued traditional practices related to crop choice and timing that evolved under former conditions. As a result, crops have died, leaving livestock starving and thirsty. Major crops, including maize, soya, cotton, sweet lime, pulses and groundnuts have withered. And scientists predict that as temperatures continue to rise and populations keep growing, the region will see harsher water shortages.

Improved weather forecasting could improve farmers’ ability to adapt to these challenging circumstances. By getting accurate information about a delayed monsoon or expected drought into farmers’ hands, weather predictions could help farmers preserve resources and prepare as best as they can, tell them which crops will be best suited to the coming conditions, and provide guidance on when to plant and harvest.

But the scale of the challenge is daunting. Some 60% of India’s more than 1.3 billion people earn a living from agriculture. Beyond the sheer numbers, India’s geographic diversity increases the complexity of accurately forecasting weather and conveying to farmers which crops will best suit their particular circumstances.

Village-to-Village Level

Jatin Singh, founder and managing director of Skymet, says he persuaded investors to help him set up a network of weather stations across India after severe droughts struck in 2003 and 2009. He recognized a fresh desire from the government to improve the nation’s weather forecasting but was aware of the challenges of a state-run system.

“I started investing [in weather forecasting infrastructure] in such a way that it would be comfortable for [the] government,” he says. “We bear the capital cost at our end, and the government pays us a rental over a long period of time.”

In 2012 there was just one government-run automated weather station in all of India. Today, Skymet owns and runs network of more than 6,500 automatic weather stations spreading across 20 of the country’s 29 states and funded through long-term contracts with state governments.

Improved weather forecasting can help food producers like this Himachal Pradesh farmer determine the best crops to plant and the best times to plant them. Photo courtesy of / Francesco FiondellaCGIAR Climate from Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The weather stations use an array of sensors to monitor temperature, wind velocity and direction, humidity, atmospheric pressure, rainfall, air quality, fog density, and soil water content and chemical composition. The readings are uploaded and fed into a system that generates individual forecasts for each location based on a variety of forecasting models, including comparing the readings with historical data and generating a big-picture model of weather patterns based on the multitude of sensors spread around the country. These artificial intelligence (AI)-generated forecasts are constantly improving their forecasts by fine-tuning based on past performance.

“On a village-to-village level, each farmer will get forecasts and [advice] a fortnight in advance,” Singh says. “This is something they’ve never had.”

With improved forecasting, Singh hopes to be able to help farmers make informed choices about which crops to plant, when. For example, they might choose to switch from water-guzzling sugarcane to growing maize when drought is predicted.

“Or they’ll just not sow,” he says. “Why take the burden of debt? Look for some other kind of work.”

Ambition for the Future

Skymet is only just starting to have enough automated weather stations on a village-to-village level to be able to offer hyperlocalized forecasting, so for most of the country this remains an ambition rather than reality. The ability to suggest specific crops to individual farmers based on soil data combined with weather data is also an ambition for the future.

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Some farmers are using the weather station network now. However, the penetration rate is still relatively low, largely because many farmers are not aware that it’s available or have not been educated how to use it. There’s still a long way to go until everyone is covered.

Singh envisions a day when every farmer in the country will receive personalized alerts about upcoming weather conditions.

“I am going to get to the individual farmer,” he says from his office on the outskirts of Delhi. “So we’re coming up with apps, we’re doing a lot of video content and we’re going to push agri-advisories and medium term weather forecasts for the individual farmer.”

While improved weather forecasting can’t prevent droughts or floods, there is renewed hope that advances in digital technology and artificial AI can help farmers mitigate the most severe impacts of climate change and so find hope instead of despair in the future.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/india-weather-stations-farms-climate-resilience/feed/1Sam RelphFake climate science videos have millions of views on YouTube. Here’s what scientists can do about it.https://ensia.com/notable/fake-science-conspiracy-theories-youtube-solutions/
https://ensia.com/notable/fake-science-conspiracy-theories-youtube-solutions/#commentsThu, 22 Aug 2019 14:15:13 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26775You probably know you can’t believe everything you see on the Internet. But you may still be surprised to find how easily fake science makes its way through YouTube and other social media sites — and how intentionally it’s being promoted. A new study from a researcher at Aachen University in Germany about the prevalence of inaccurate climate science and conspiracy theories on YouTube illustrates the grim reality, but also a way to fix it. The study used 10 different search terms on YouTube, such as “climate change,” “climate science,” “geoengineering” and “climate hacking,” and analyzed the results to see which videos supported the scientific consensus around climate change and which did not. It also used an internet tool called Tor, which anonymizes users, in order to avoid YouTube’s practice of personalizing search results based on previously watched videos, location and other demographics. Overall, most videos in the 200-video sample disagreed with the scientific consensus around climate change, and of those, 85% actively spread conspiracy theories. Videos that agreed with scientific consensus received more total views than those that disagreed, but by only 2,300 views — and both categories had almost 17 million views each. YouTube has taken some steps to counter this, outlined in an update it published on its blog in July 2018. One major change was the addition of blurbs drawn from Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica next to videos on “well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation,” such as the moon landing. But the study’s author, Joachim Allgaier, explores another solution that doesn’t involve YouTube changing its guidelines or algorithms. In the study, he writes, “YouTube and other online video-sharing websites have an enormous potential as tools for science and environmental education … [T]he professional communities from these subject areas will do well to engage effectively with these communication channels.” In other words, scientists should step up to the plate and produce more YouTube videos that fit with the facts. Getting more scientists actively engaged in science education is no easy feat — but, at least on YouTube, it is already happening.… Read More

You probably know you can’t believe everything you see on the Internet. But you may still be surprised to find how easily fake science makes its way through YouTube and other social media sites — and how intentionally it’s being promoted.

A new study from a researcher at Aachen University in Germany about the prevalence of inaccurate climate science and conspiracy theories on YouTube illustrates the grim reality, but also a way to fix it.

The study used 10 different search terms on YouTube, such as “climate change,” “climate science,” “geoengineering” and “climate hacking,” and analyzed the results to see which videos supported the scientific consensus around climate change and which did not.

It also used an internet tool called Tor, which anonymizes users, in order to avoid YouTube’s practice of personalizing search results based on previously watched videos, location and other demographics.

Overall, most videos in the 200-video sample disagreed with the scientific consensus around climate change, and of those, 85% actively spread conspiracy theories. Videos that agreed with scientific consensus received more total views than those that disagreed, but by only 2,300 views — and both categories had almost 17 million views each.

YouTube has taken some steps to counter this, outlined in an update it published on its blog in July 2018. One major change was the addition of blurbs drawn from Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica next to videos on “well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation,” such as the moon landing.

But the study’s author, Joachim Allgaier, explores another solution that doesn’t involve YouTube changing its guidelines or algorithms. In the study, he writes, “YouTube and other online video-sharing websites have an enormous potential as tools for science and environmental education … [T]he professional communities from these subject areas will do well to engage effectively with these communication channels.”

In other words, scientists should step up to the plate and produce more YouTube videos that fit with the facts.

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Getting more scientists actively engaged in science education is no easy feat — but, at least on YouTube, it is already happening. Channels like SciShow, Physics Girl, The Brain Scoop and more provide a wide range of science content. In Allgaier’s study, four videos from “Science YouTubers,” including SciShow, appeared in the sample and had the third highest views of all videos in the sample.

Scientists don’t necessarily have to create a new YouTube channel, buy fancy video equipment and hire a team of script writers or video editors in order to have an impact. SciShow, for instance, is hosted by non-scientist YouTuber Hank Green and others, but hires scientists as consultants to develop curriculum and video ideas. Crash Course, a channel owned by the same education company as SciShow (it’s called Complexly, and it’s owned by Green and his brother), also hires chemistry and geography experts.

There’s another angle on this that Allgaier notes. When he used the search term “chemtrails,” all but one of the videos in the sample actively supported the common conspiracy theory. If someone did search for that information, there might not be any scientifically accurate videos to counter all the conspiracy content. A similar pattern appeared with the term “geoengineering,” and Allgaier writes that the scientific term has been “hijacked” by conspiracy advocates to push their own agenda.

So, there’s something to be said for using those terms to intentionally push more real science videos into the search results for common conspiracies like chemtrails, and possibly reclaim words like “geoengineering” that have been corrupted.

Fixing misinformation and fake science online is not an easy task, and it won’t happen overnight. But maybe, as Allgaier says, instead of waiting for YouTube to take action, scientists can start their own ball rolling.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/fake-science-conspiracy-theories-youtube-solutions/feed/1Hannah BernsteinLook out, food deserts: Here come the food forestshttps://ensia.com/features/urban-forests-green-spaces-food-security/
https://ensia.com/features/urban-forests-green-spaces-food-security/#respondTue, 20 Aug 2019 17:54:06 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26736Editor’s note: The following is a contributed piece from Smart Cities Dive, a business and leadership-facing publication covering smart city trends and analysis. Cities like Atlanta and Philadelphia are recognizing a park can be more than just a green space when visitors are allowed to pick fruits, vegetables and nuts. A walk through an Atlanta park will soon include the option of picking berries, plucking apples from trees or gathering herbs from surrounding plants — all for free. The Food Forest at Browns Mill, which has been years in the making, surged ahead in May when the Atlanta City Council unanimously approved an ordinance to use grant money secured from the U.S. Forest Service to purchase a 7.1-acre (2.9-hectare) plot of land from The Conservation Fund for a food forest. The land was a working farm for decades but sold for redevelopment in 2006; the development plan was abandoned when the recession hit, and the land sat vacant until The Conservation Fund purchased it in 2016. The park will serve as a community green space complete with trails and a large-scale edible garden. Atlanta’s Department of Parks and Recreation will oversee the property while nonprofit Trees Atlanta maintains it. Volunteers already have pitched in for site restoration and construction — including creek and pecan orchard restoration — in addition to planting hundreds of food-bearing trees and plants. The city conducted extensive community outreach and assessments to identify available land for this project. Some of the suggested properties no longer were suitable for other developments due to issues like drainage, but they could work as a food forest. Targeting these properties carries the ancillary benefit of eliminating blight and improving quality of life for citizens within the neighborhood. “When you transform that [property] into a lighthouse of nutrition, you have now created the greatest asset in the community out of the greatest liability,” ​says Mario Cambardella, urban agriculture director for the city of Atlanta. A key component of Atlanta’s Food Forest at Browns Mill is its placement in an area the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers a food desert. The project supports a city… Read More

Editor’s note: The following is a contributed piece from Smart Cities Dive, a business and leadership-facing publication covering smart city trends and analysis.

Cities like Atlanta and Philadelphia are recognizing a park can be more than just a green space when visitors are allowed to pick fruits, vegetables and nuts.

A walk through an Atlanta park will soon include the option of picking berries, plucking apples from trees or gathering herbs from surrounding plants — all for free.

The Food Forest at Browns Mill, which has been years in the making, surged ahead in May when the Atlanta City Council unanimously approved an ordinance to use grant money secured from the U.S. Forest Service to purchase a 7.1-acre (2.9-hectare) plot of land from The Conservation Fund for a food forest.

The land was a working farm for decades but sold for redevelopment in 2006; the development plan was abandoned when the recession hit, and the land sat vacant until The Conservation Fund purchased it in 2016.

The park will serve as a community green space complete with trails and a large-scale edible garden. Atlanta’s Department of Parks and Recreation will oversee the property while nonprofit Trees Atlanta maintains it. Volunteers already have pitched in for site restoration and construction — including creek and pecan orchard restoration — in addition to planting hundreds of food-bearing trees and plants.

The city conducted extensive community outreach and assessments to identify available land for this project. Some of the suggested properties no longer were suitable for other developments due to issues like drainage, but they could work as a food forest. Targeting these properties carries the ancillary benefit of eliminating blight and improving quality of life for citizens within the neighborhood.

“When you transform that [property] into a lighthouse of nutrition, you have now created the greatest asset in the community out of the greatest liability,” ​says Mario Cambardella, urban agriculture director for the city of Atlanta.

A key component of Atlanta’s Food Forest at Browns Mill is its placement in an area the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers a food desert. The project supports a city goal of strengthening the local food economy to ensure 85% of citizens live within a half mile of access to fresh, healthy food by 2022.

In 2010, 53% of Atlanta was considered a food desert and that dropped to 36% by the end of 2017, representing approximately a quarter of the city’s population. Simply relying on grocery stores to fill the void won’t solve the food desert problem, Cambardella says.

“It’s going to take many strategies. … We have to stimulate, strengthen and support that local food system that’s going to bring affordable, equitable and resilient local food systems to these communities,” he says. “If we’re providing access to free, fresh food, that creates considerable income to be spent on other things that are just as important.”

“The kinds of partnerships food forests foster are exactly that, resilient partnerships for long-term commitments to a community.” – Rich DoleshBeyond acting as a food source for visitors, food forests can serve as a source for local food banks; a habitat for bees, birds and other wildlife; an agricultural education and enrichment tool; and a workforce and leadership skills development space.

“The notion of social resiliency is important,” says Rich Dolesh, National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) vice president for strategic initiatives. “The kinds of partnerships food forests foster are exactly that, resilient partnerships for long-term commitments to a community.”

Cambardella says there are also lesser-known benefits. For instance, urban agriculture at Browns Mill provides resources for a local nonprofit that forages medicinal herbs to make into remedies for homeless residents’ hand, foot and extremity ailments. “It’s important to show how this one little food forest is playing a role in supporting our most vulnerable residents,” he says.

The seven layers of a complete food forest range from canopy fruit and nut trees to ground-level foods such as strawberries and roots. Image courtesy of Graham Burnett from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Although nonprofits and community groups often drive public agriculture projects, public agencies are becoming more involved.

“Park agencies are looking for opportunities to make innovative connections to their communities. This is an emerging, innovative way to look at multi-benefit landscapes,” Dolesh says.

Taking Root Across the U.S.

Food forests are not a new concept, but up until recently, they were not widely applied in urban parts of the United States.

“The whole movement really is taking off,” Dolesh says. “A ‘food forest’ is a new name for what were traditionally called ‘community orchards.'”

Food forests are a form of permaculture, or a system of regenerating agriculture. Traditional farms, community gardens and orchards tend to grow food completely or mostly at the same plane, but food forests involve an ecological design that mimics how plants naturally grow on multiple layers within a forest.

A complete food forest has seven layers: tall fruit and nut trees serving as a canopy; shorter fruit and nut trees; shrubs or bushes that bear fruit; an herbaceous layer that includes herbs and non-woody plants such as vegetables; ground-hugging plants, such as strawberries; vines; and roots.

While that’s the textbook answer, “the community has to answer that question of ‘what is a food forest,’ and each answers it a little differently,” Cambardella says.

One project heralded as a leader is Beacon Food Forest in Seattle, which began forming a decade ago. At 7 acres (3 hectares), it’s nearly as large as Atlanta’s food forest, which is considered one of the largest in the United States. Many communities setting up their own permaculture projects seek advice from Beacon’s organizers.

Michael Muehlbauer worked with the Beacon group and now aims to establish the Fair-Amount Food Forest in Philadelphia. His organization hopes to formalize an agreement soon with Parks and Recreation to use publicly owned parkland for the project. Like Beacon, the intention is for the Fair-Amount Food Forest to be a primarily volunteer-run project, with the hope of hiring program staff down the line.

The Fair-Amount Food Forest found collaboration in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood and aims to increase food equity and access in an area that could be considered a food desert. Organizers have engaged community members to determine what neighborhood residents would like planted. The current plan involves more than 240 species of plants.

Ripe plums mark the site of the Fair-Amount Food Forest, a community-based initiative that aims to expand access to fresh fruits and other edibles for Philadelphia residents. Photo courtesy of Michael Muehlbauer/Fair-Amount Food Forest

“Our partners have been working in food access, nutrition and gardening in the neighborhood for quite a while, and this is a way for us to increase access and education [to fresh food] and food system education in the area,” Muehlbauer says.

The Philadelphia Orchard Project is another prominent urban agriculture-focused organization. It partners with other community groups to help with oversight of the more than 50 local orchard sites on city-owned land.

The organization has several principles for choosing viable partners, one of which is increasing citizens’ food security by ensuring at least some of what is grown in the orchards becomes available to those with limited access to fresh foods.

Although not all sites are open for public harvesting, “the food does have to get into the community in one way or another,” such as through food distribution or after school programs, says Phil Forsyth, Philadelphia Orchard Project executive director. The group requires that “the majority of what’s harvested gets out into the neighborhood for free.”

Not Always a Walk in the Park

Creating and maintaining a food forest bears plenty of complexities and challenges. Forging the right partnerships is key to successfully overcoming difficulties, sources say.

Many public agriculture projects in the United States are partnerships between the public sector and nonprofit groups. Often the gardens, orchards and food forests are located on publicly owned land, but nonprofit groups manage the site. Non-governmental groups tend to have more flexibility to experiment with agricultural programs and implement them quickly without encountering barriers from layers of bureaucracy.

An obvious issue is figuring out how much funding is necessary and securing a source. Federal grants exist for park permaculture, as do grants through organizations like NRPA.

The budgeting for a food forest takes some research because it isn’t necessarily the same as other public green spaces. For example, a typical park project might budget 90% of its funds toward capital improvements, 5% for community engagement and 5% for maintenance, Cambardella says. But the Food Forest at Browns Mill is splitting its budget in thirds: 33% toward capital and infrastructure improvements, 33% toward community engagement and 33% toward the required management for a food-producing landscape.

Choosing regionally appropriate plants must be part of the process. Apples and peaches are frequently requested items, “but those can be the two most challenging fruits to grow in a humid climate like ours,” says Philadelphia Orchard Project’s Forsyth. “We do a lot of work educating partners on other choices … that are much easier to grow, and therefore are more likely to get consistent production from year to year.”

In addition, certain plants and trees will bear fruit and nuts relatively quickly, whereas others won’t produce a yield for many years after planting.

Although permaculture in many ways is self-sustaining, ongoing care is necessary, especially in urban settings.Ongoing landscape management is sometimes overlooked but should be considered because it is both funding and labor intensive, sources say. Although permaculture in many ways is self-sustaining, ongoing care is necessary, especially in urban settings.

“It’s a very challenging proposition to manage these,” Dolesh says. “Fruit-bearing trees are problematic for parks.” If the land is not properly maintained, “food winds up on ground, it gets trampled, it starts rotting, it draws beasts,” he says.

Another critical consideration is that food-bearing plants attract pests that can lessen yield, or even decimate crops. Although traditional farms might use pesticides and fungicides to mitigate that problem, public permaculture projects rely on organic land management principles to ensure the public feels comfortable and safe harvesting and ingesting the food.

“You have to look at a whole organic regime of integrated pest management. It’s going to be a challenge to manage those and you need highly-trained staff and volunteers to do this right,” Dolesh says. Besides insects, public permaculture “is a buffet” for animals including deer, raccoons, skunks and rats.

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“You have to manage the land extensively to control those and not let them completely take over a food forest intended for public benefit,” Dolesh says, adding that it takes “a balance.”

Balance also is necessary to ensure people do not overharvest at a food forest. Signage helps to remind harvesters to respect the space for the rest of the community.

Public education plays a significant role in preventing overharvesting. Citizens cannot be expected to automatically know which fruits, nuts and herbs are usable.

For example, the Atlanta community largely targeted raspberries for its food forest because that was what they knew, but few residents realized the area’s many mulberry trees bear edible fruits, Cambardella explained. Other food forest visitors don’t know how to harvest at all.

“The education on how to utilize and benefit from different plants, how they grow and the environment… needs to be part of the picture for actual change.” – Michael MuehlbauerEducating people about the variety of productive crops and driving them toward lesser-known ones can prevent overharvesting while opening doors to underutilized food sources. The combination of better healthy food access and education can prompt people to make better nutritional decisions in their daily lives.

Educational elements are at the forefront of planning for the Fair-Amount Food Forest in Philadelphia as well.

“Just providing access to food isn’t really the whole picture. The education on how to utilize and benefit from different plants, how they grow and the environment … needs to be part of the picture for actual change,” Muehlbauer says.

Regardless of the challenges, investments in public permaculture projects continue to grow due to the abundant advantages.

“Food forests really help to make resilient communities. They add value not just for the infrastructure aspects but also resiliency outcomes. The partnerships formed are deep and lasting,” Dolesh says.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/urban-forests-green-spaces-food-security/feed/0Katie PyzykAs the climate crisis intensifies, lawsuits aimed at slowing greenhouse gas emissions are on the risehttps://ensia.com/notable/climate-crisis-lawsuits-greenhouse-gas-emissions/
https://ensia.com/notable/climate-crisis-lawsuits-greenhouse-gas-emissions/#respondFri, 16 Aug 2019 14:19:37 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26701Can you sue to save the world? As the global climate crisis intensifies, people are increasingly taking governments and corporations to court in a bid to slow runaway greenhouse gas emissions. Most climate lawsuits have been filed in the United States, but recent years have brought an increase in litigation in low- and middle-income countries, according to a new report published by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy. The report offers a snapshot of climate-related lawsuits around the globe. It found that some recent court cases have shed light on what climate change means for human rights, although no systematic research has yet established exactly how these lawsuits translate into action outside the courtroom. Human rights are increasingly important in climate lawsuits, according to the report. In a key 2015 case, for example, a court in Pakistan pointed to “fundamental rights” and ruled in favor of a farmer who sued the government for failing to quickly implement the country’s climate policy. A stream of other lawsuits, investigations and international claims focus on human rights, and the report predicts that trend will extend into the future. The report covers legal cases from two databases, Climate Change Laws of the World and U.S. Climate Change Litigation. It found that at least 28 countries and several international courts have heard roughly 1,330 climate cases. While plaintiffs have been largely activists, non-governmental organizations and local governments suing for stronger climate action, some of the cases covered in the report were filed by businesses and organizations challenging environmental regulation. And what have the courts said? A review of U.S. lawsuits between 1990 and 2016 finds mixed results, with litigants that support more restrictive environmental regulation tending to lose cases slightly more often than anti-regulation litigants. But under the Trump administration, the report states, “no rollback of climate regulation brought before the courts has survived legal challenge.” Many cases, including the high-profile Juliana v. United States fight over whether greenhouse gas emissions violate the constitutional rights of young people, are still winding their way through the judicial system.… Read More

Can you sue to save the world? As the global climate crisis intensifies, people are increasingly taking governments and corporations to court in a bid to slow runaway greenhouse gas emissions.

Most climate lawsuits have been filed in the United States, but recent years have brought an increase in litigation in low- and middle-income countries, according to a new report published by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy.

The report offers a snapshot of climate-related lawsuits around the globe. It found that some recent court cases have shed light on what climate change means for human rights, although no systematic research has yet established exactly how these lawsuits translate into action outside the courtroom.

The report covers legal cases from two databases, Climate Change Laws of the World and U.S. Climate Change Litigation. It found that at least 28 countries and several international courts have heard roughly 1,330 climate cases. While plaintiffs have been largely activists, non-governmental organizations and local governments suing for stronger climate action, some of the cases covered in the report were filed by businesses and organizations challenging environmental regulation.

And what have the courts said? A review of U.S. lawsuits between 1990 and 2016 finds mixed results, with litigants that support more restrictive environmental regulation tending to lose cases slightly more often than anti-regulation litigants. But under the Trump administration, the report states, “no rollback of climate regulation brought before the courts has survived legal challenge.” Many cases, including the high-profile Juliana v. United States fight over whether greenhouse gas emissions violate the constitutional rights of young people, are still winding their way through the judicial system.

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After the U.S., the jurisdictions home to the highest number of climate-related lawsuits are Australia, the EU, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada and Spain. In the Netherlands, an environmental group sued in the first legal case to end with a ruling directing a government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than lawmakers had originally proclaimed.

While climate litigation is more common in wealthier countries responsible for a disproportionate share of emissions throughout history, other areas aren’t absent. The report says that climate lawsuits in low- and middle-income nations have grown in number and importance.

New lawsuits in places like Pakistan, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Colombia and Brazil have expanded the geographic reach of climate litigation. In 2018, for instance, the Supreme Court of Colombia ruled that climate change threatens the rights of young people, while also granting environmental personhood to the Colombian Amazon, declaring that the ecosystem has its own rights to conservation and restoration.

Lawsuits over the climate crisis could influence public policy, business decisions and media coverage in complex ways. But little research has been done on that influence, so the report calls for more study on how court cases shape the world “beyond the courtroom.” On the overall impact of climate litigation, the jury is still out — for now.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/climate-crisis-lawsuits-greenhouse-gas-emissions/feed/0Andrew UrevigAncient Amazonian societies managed the forest intensively but sustainably — here’s what we can learn from themhttps://ensia.com/features/ancient-amazonian-societies-managed-the-forest-intensively-but-sustainably-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-them/
https://ensia.com/features/ancient-amazonian-societies-managed-the-forest-intensively-but-sustainably-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-them/#commentsThu, 15 Aug 2019 17:21:00 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26668When loggers and cattle ranchers began toppling the rainforest in Brazil’s far western state of Acre, they revealed a mystery: vast ancient earthworks, hidden for centuries under the trees. These “geoglyphs” took the form of geometric shapes — squares, rectangles and circles — hundreds of meters across, marked out with ditches and raised mounds. Since the 1980s, around 450 geoglyphs have been identified in Acre alone, dating back between 650 and 2,000 years — offering new perspectives on the supposed pristine nature of the Amazon as well as insights into how agriculture and healthy ecosystems might coexist. The Amazon has long been thought of as an untrammeled ecosystem, a wilderness relatively untouched by humans. Indigenous peoples were presumed to be so few in number, and live so lightly on the land, that they had a negligible impact on the environment. But recent interdisciplinary research across the Amazon basin is overturning that old story. It’s showing instead that the rainforest’s early inhabitants numbered in the millions, and that they managed the landscape intensively, in complex and sustainable ways — offering lessons for how we manage the Amazon today. Ancient Agroforestry Jennifer Watling, currently an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, spent several seasons digging holes in some of Acre’s geoglyphs for her Ph.D. research at the University of Exeter in the U.K. It is still unclear exactly what the geoglyphs were used for, Watling says. From the lack of household debris, it seems people didn’t live there, but perhaps visited for ceremonies and other special events. New tools, including the analysis of microscopic plant remains called phytoliths, are helping archaeologists find other stories in the soil. “Unlike today, they weren’t just completely denuding the landscape and creating monocultures,” Watling says. Instead, the number of palm trees around the sites increased over time. “It looks a lot like agroforestry — managing the landscape, encouraging palms and probably other useful plants as well,” Watling says. “The more that we’re digging and looking into plant remains and ecology, the more we’re seeing that actually large areas of the Amazon were inhabited,… Read More

These “geoglyphs” took the form of geometric shapes — squares, rectangles and circles — hundreds of meters across, marked out with ditches and raised mounds. Since the 1980s, around 450 geoglyphs have been identified in Acre alone, dating back between 650 and 2,000 years— offering new perspectives on the supposed pristine nature of the Amazon as well as insights into how agriculture and healthy ecosystems might coexist.

The Amazon has long been thought of as an untrammeled ecosystem, a wilderness relatively untouched by humans. Indigenous peoples were presumed to be so few in number, and live so lightly on the land, that they had a negligible impact on the environment.

But recent interdisciplinary research across the Amazon basin is overturning that old story. It’s showing instead that the rainforest’s early inhabitants numbered in the millions, and that they managed the landscape intensively, in complex and sustainable ways — offering lessons for how we manage the Amazon today.

Ancient Agroforestry

Jennifer Watling, currently an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, spent several seasons digging holes in some of Acre’s geoglyphs for her Ph.D. researchat the University of Exeter in the U.K.

It is still unclear exactly what the geoglyphs were used for, Watling says. From the lack of household debris, it seems people didn’t live there, but perhaps visited for ceremonies and other special events. New tools, including the analysis of microscopic plant remains called phytoliths, are helping archaeologists find other stories in the soil.

Agroforesters grow crops among trees for benefits such as increased biodiversity and soil health. Of the ancient sites archaeologists are finding in Brazil, one researcher says, “It looks a lot like agroforestry — managing the landscape, encouraging palms and probably other useful plants as well.” Photo courtesy of Icaro Cooke Vieira/CIFOR

“Unlike today, they weren’t just completely denuding the landscape and creating monocultures,” Watling says. Instead, the number of palm trees around the sites increased over time. “It looks a lot like agroforestry — managing the landscape, encouraging palms and probably other useful plants as well,” Watling says.

“The more that we’re digging and looking into plant remains and ecology, the more we’re seeing that actually large areas of the Amazon were inhabited, and people had significant impacts on soils, on ecosystems — and in some areas we can see those impacts today.”

A Crowded Amazon

Similar earthworks have now been found along 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) of southern Amazonia. “Everywhere we’re looking, we’re finding people,” says Mark Robinson, also from the University of Exeter, which has been delving into these questions for the past few years.

Robinson and some colleagues were scrolling around the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso on Google Earth, looking at areas that had been recently deforested. “Suddenly we started seeing these big earthworks — hold on, that’s not natural!”

When Robinson’s team went there and started digging, they identified 81 new archaeological sites, mainly ditched enclosures, as well as ceramics and stone tools. “It was a whole culture no one had ever seen before.”

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The results, published in Nature Communications, provided the missing link between Acre and the eastern Amazon, Robinson says: “We could show the whole southern rim of the Amazon was occupied.”

Understanding how all those people shaped their environment, and how resilient those ecosystems were to human disturbance, is critical for making informed decisions today, Robinson says.

“Populations in forested areas worldwide, especially in tropical areas, are increasing, so to make sustainable choices about how to interact with resources is going to be really integral,” he says. Research from other parts of the Amazon is raising intriguing suggestions about how to do that.

Edible Forests

Further north, near where the Tapajós River meets the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Pará, another University of Exeter team used techniques from archaeology, botany, paleoecology and remote sensing to investigate how pre-Columbian peoples shaped the landscape around them — and found that they permanently changed the composition of the forest itself.

Alongside traditional archaeological excavations, the team analyzed the soil chemistry, identified phytoliths and other plant remains, surveyed the modern vegetation, and took sediment cores from nearby Lake Caranã to track changes in pollen and charcoal over time.

Published in Nature Plants, the researchers’ study shows that for millennia, the area’s inhabitants had practiced a diversified land use strategy akin to what we now call “polyculture agroforestry” — growing a wide variety of food crops while keeping trees and forests standing.

The authors of one study created a conceptual drawing of the pre-Columbian changes in vegetation and land use. Phase 2 shows controlled burning to clear forest to allow for crop cultivation, while phase 3 shows the selective enrichment of the forest with useful/edible species and the formation of “terra preta” or Amazonian Dark Earths. Image courtesy of Dr. S. Yoshi Maezumi.

The charcoal evidence and the appearance of maize pollen suggests people settled in this region around 4,500 years ago and began selectively burning the forest to plant crops, says the study’s lead author, Yoshi Maezumi, now at the University of the West Indies (Mona) in Jamaica.

They brought with them a tool kit of domesticated annual crops — maize, squash, sweet potato and manioc. But they also began favoring useful palm and tree species — cashews, cacao, açaí palms and Brazil nuts. “They weren’t clear-cutting,” Maezumi says. “These edible forests were still closed, shady and protected.”

Continuous Compost

The echo of these ancient farming practices is still present in the current makeup of the forest near archaeological sites, she says. “It might look like a natural forest, but when you come across a grove of Brazil nuts or açaí palms, it’s not a natural concentration.”

Scientists call this overrepresentation “hyperdominance,” and several studies have shown that domesticated species are five timesmore likely than undomesticated species to be hyperdominant in the Amazon — a lasting legacy of the human taste for fruit, nuts and chocolate.

In addition, while the monoculture crops grown in the Amazon region today —soybean, corn and sugarcane — tend to exhaust and erode the soilover time, the ancient agroforesters actually enriched the soils as they went.

“Across the tropics, because of this idea of pristine ecosystems, conservation has been used to justify kicking indigenous people or small-scale farmers off their lands.” –Patrick Roberts

Agroforestry and soil enrichment enabled early societies to support large populations over the long term, despite dramatic climatic fluctuations, Maezumi says. The diversified land use made these communities resilient enough to cope.

What the indigenous people weren’t able to cope with was the arrival of Europeans. Epidemics, slavery, starvation and warfare led to catastrophic depopulationof the Amazon shortly after 1492 — and the subsequent myth of the “pristine, uninhabited rainforest.”

Millennial Perspective

It’s time to put that myth to bed, says Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany who has reviewed a growing pile of academic studies showing long-term human impacts on tropical forests around the world.

“Across the tropics, because of this idea of pristine ecosystems, conservation has been used to justify kicking indigenous people or small-scale farmers off their lands,” he says. Instead, conservationists and policymakers should consult them, he says.

“The people who have been on this land for millennia are the ones who know best how to use it,” he says. “If nothing was ever pristine, we need to look at what was the best-managed landscape to return to.”

Archaeology is now beginning to offer important insights for conservation and environmental policy, he says: “It’s the only discipline that has this millennial perspective on human impacts on environments.”

It can tell us what plants once grew in a certain place, allowing them to be reintroduced. The dispersed “garden-cities” of the pre-Columbian Amazon are inspiring contemporary urban planners, and there are efforts to try to re-create soils with the fertility of terra preta.

And in Pará, says Maezumi, the Amazon’s ancient agroforesters show you don’t have to flatten the forest to farm productively.

“You can have large trees in place, sequestering carbon and providing biodiversity benefits while still sustaining large populations and having diverse food resources.”

Watling sees a similar lesson in the history written in the archaeological archives in Acre. Whereas many of today’s farming practices destroy the forests to bring in agriculture, “people in the past used them — and preserved them,” she says.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/ancient-amazonian-societies-managed-the-forest-intensively-but-sustainably-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-them/feed/1Kate EvansIn the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, efforts to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical system offer lessons for boosting energy securityhttps://ensia.com/articles/electrical-production-hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-energy-security-resilience/
https://ensia.com/articles/electrical-production-hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-energy-security-resilience/#respondTue, 13 Aug 2019 17:45:13 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=articles&p=26644After Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, one of the first things I saw outside were my neighbors working together to clear the streets of fallen trees and debris. It was difficult to see the damage and not feel an immense sense of sadness. Like others throughout the U.S. territory, only those with functioning generators had electricity, and no one could contact family members because the lines of communication we down. Those of us without generators couldn’t refrigerate our food, light our homes or use our bathrooms in a normal way. According to official estimates, some 3,000 people died as a result of the devastating event. Running water became inaccessible in many homes. Roads were blocked. Across the island, power lines were downed, and power plants suffered significant damages, shutting down communications systems, traffic lights and hospitals, among other vital resources in day-to-day life. It took nearly a year for the government-run Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA, also known as Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica or AEE), which is the only power company in Puerto Rico, to restore electricity throughout the island. This was the biggest and longest power outage in U.S. history. As scientists suggest that weather will probably become more extreme and weather-related natural disasters are likely to intensify in the coming decades, preparing energy systems for — and helping them recover from — weather-related disasters is an increasingly important topic. In the case of hurricanes, we can learn some valuable lessons from what Puerto Rico has gone through in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Lesson 1: Maintain Infrastructure Imported fossil fuels meet approximately three-quarters of Puerto Rico’s energy demand, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Puerto Rico’s electrical system is highly centralized, according to Lionel Orama-Exclusa, an engineering professor at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) Mayagüez campus and committee member of El Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña. The institute brings together experts across disciplines and campuses within the University of Puerto Rico system to address energy policy and sustainability. Before the hurricane, only 2% of the territory’s electrical power came from… Read More

After Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, one of the first things I saw outside were my neighbors working together to clear the streets of fallen trees and debris. It was difficult to see the damage and not feel an immense sense of sadness. Like others throughout the U.S. territory, only those with functioning generators had electricity, and no one could contact family members because the lines of communication we down. Those of us without generators couldn’t refrigerate our food, light our homes or use our bathrooms in a normal way.

According to official estimates, some3,000 people died as a result of the devastating event. Running water became inaccessible in many homes. Roads were blocked. Across the island, power lines were downed, and power plants suffered significant damages, shutting down communications systems, traffic lights and hospitals, among other vital resources in day-to-day life.

Hurricane Maria destroyed or damaged much of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, including its centralized power system. Image courtesy of NASA

It tooknearly a year for the government-run Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA, also known as Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica or AEE), which is the only power company in Puerto Rico, to restore electricity throughout the island. This was the biggest and longest power outage in U.S. history.

As scientists suggest that weather will probably become more extreme and weather-related natural disasters are likely to intensify in the coming decades, preparing energy systems for — and helping them recover from — weather-related disasters is an increasingly important topic. In the case of hurricanes, we can learn some valuable lessons from what Puerto Rico has gone through in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Puerto Rico’s electrical system is highly centralized, according to Lionel Orama-Exclusa, an engineering professor at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) Mayagüez campus and committee member ofEl Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña. The institute brings together experts across disciplines and campuses within the University of Puerto Rico system to address energy policy and sustainability.

Click to enlarge. Credit: Sean Quinn | Ensia

Before the hurricane, only 2% of the territory’s electrical power came from renewable energy sources. There rest was from petroleum (47%), natural gas (34%) and coal (17%). And because Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico about a decade into an economic crisis, the electricity infrastructure was already vulnerable. The EIAfound that before the hurricane, PREPA’s electricity generators were 28 years older and experienced outage rates 12 times higher than the U.S. average.

“Other countries should look at themselves in the mirror of austerity,” says Arturo Massol-Deyá, a biology professor at UPR Mayagüez and long-time environmental activist withCasa Pueblo, a community-based organization founded more than 30 years ago to protect natural resources in Puerto Rico.

“By not paying attention to infrastructure and not having maintained it, by not doing [the] things that are necessary, when a hurricane happens like this, the consequences are catastrophic,” Massol-Deyá says. “Other countries need to be careful when they manage their economic crisis and the rest, not to place their countries in a position of increased vulnerability before natural events.”

Lesson 2: The Value of Decentralization

A decentralized electrical system would increase resiliency, says Orama-Exclusa.

Aguirre Power Plant for example, is one of the four main power plants on the island. Located in the southern coastal town of Salinas, it supplies electricity to the San Juan metropolitan area in northeastern Puerto Rico. The Los Angeles Times reported that the power plant was already neglected and suffering failures before the hurricane. After the hurricane, Aguirre wasnot operating; approximately two months after Hurricane Maria swept over Puerto Rico, PREPA was still working to restore a powerline from Salinas to the north.

It took billions of dollars and nearly a year to restore power throughout Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria slammed the U.S. territory in September 2017. Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense | Air Force Master Sgt. Joshua L. DeMotts

Hurricanes often interrupt shipments, “so you have oil shortages, diesel shortages, gas shortages, coal shortages,” says lawyer and activist Ruth Santiago a long-time Salinas resident with ties to the Comité Dialogo Ambiental, a group that works towards environmental protection and sustainability. “It makes a lot more sense to have your energy generation closer to where it’s going to be used, as opposed to long-distance. … [T]hat means that communities now need to be involved in energy generation.”

Orama-Exclusa says the Puerto Rican government should use theIsland Energy Playbook, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Transitions Initiative and recommends a framework for an energy transition that communities can use. It also includes lessons learned from various islands that have been making energy changes, and templates and worksheets for proposed work. For example, the playbook showcases the creation of “clear and well-defined interconnection policies and procedures” in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which in 2010 set a goal to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels 60% by 2025.

Lesson 3: Renewables Add Resilience

Renewable energy sources in particular are a focal point of the ongoing discussion about the resiliency of the sources of electricity on the island.

Orama-Exclusa says that renewable energy sources, such as solar power, can boost resilience. A system based on renewables could support the creation of micro-networks of energy that are more resilient than centralized distribution systems. Some households have already started using solar energy, so they can depend less on the main PREPA grid. And according to National Public Radio, Puerto Ricans are expected to spend more than US$400 million on solar power in the next five years.

Poverty, however, is still a significant obstacle for many people, says Massol-Deyá.

Several groups, including Cambio, Comité Dialogo Ambiental, Sierra Club Puerto Rico, and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), are supporting a civil society energy proposal calledQueremos Sol, which calls for a “rapid move to rooftop solar communities … that would empower local communities and local people,” says Santiago.

Yet Massol-Deyá and others are concerned that despite the advantages that renewables offer for boosting resilience to future hurricanes, the Puerto Rican government might be moving away from renewable energy sources.

Eye to the Future

After the hurricane, the government set up the same infrastructure that was present before, Massol-Deyá says. If close to a Category 3 hurricane or above were to make landfall in Puerto Rico now, “the country’s electrical system would be just as destroyed as it was in 2017,” Orama-Exclusa says — though recovery might be quicker because PREPA employees have an idea of what’s needed to get the system up and running again after such an event. There is also the question of what will happen if PREPA is privatized, since the Puerto Rican government is trying to sell it.

Groups from different sectors of society have proposed or created plans to guide Puerto Rico’s electrical future. Several of the plans are tied to the Puerto Rican government: thePlan Integrado de Recursos (PIR) or Integrated Resource Plan (IRP); theRestructuring Support Agreement (RSA) to restructure PREPA’s debt; and alaw signed in April 2019 by then–Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares to establish the island’s energy public policy. Those three frameworks contradict each other, Orama-Exclusa says; which will prevail remains to be seen.

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Eighteen organizations, including Espacios Abiertos, Cambio, and the Instituto Nacional de Energía y Sostenibilidad Isleña, have asked that the restructuring agreement be cancelled because it would benefit bondholders and increase the cost of electricity for consumers,Metro Puerto Rico reported. The agreement was alsocriticized in a letter signed in June 2019 by 36 U.S. congressional representatives, arguing that the deal should be rejected. The representatives expressed concern in that letter that the agreement “will increase Puerto Ricans’ electric bills and stymie development of renewable energy,” according to a report in The Hill.

Orama-Exclusa is concerned that the utility will move from petroleum to natural gas. “That would be contrary to the philosophy of the rest of the world, because even countries with no sunlight are moving towards solar energy,” he says. His concern isn’t unfounded: El Nuevo Día reported in July 2019 that construction is underway for a new electrical power plant in northern Puerto Rico, which will run on natural gas.

According to Orama-Exclusa, Puerto Rico’s situation suggests that governments should agree on one vision for their energy future before establishing a regulatory framework and renegotiating debts. Additionally, he says that the vision should be agreed upon by citizens through an open, participatory system. Then the government and policymakers need to adopt that vision and make energy plans that go along with the vision.

If this strategy is put into place in Puerto Rico, the more resilient energy production and distribution system that results could help the territory deal with future hurricanes better and bounce back faster than was the case with Maria. Perhaps then there could be less suffering and fewer deaths like those that have left a deep wound in the hearts of countless Puerto Ricans, even as they strive to move forward and prepare themselves for a potential future hurricane.

]]>https://ensia.com/articles/electrical-production-hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-energy-security-resilience/feed/0Mariela Santos-MuñizWhat can we do to lessen the toll of climate change on the world’s poorest people?https://ensia.com/notable/climate-change-adaptation-poverty/
https://ensia.com/notable/climate-change-adaptation-poverty/#respondThu, 08 Aug 2019 14:29:09 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26613The climate crisis has hit hardest for low-income people in the Global South, widening the economic gap between rich and poor countries by about 25%, according to one study. Meanwhile, natural disasters such as floods and droughts push millions of people into poverty each year, even as climbing temperatures raise the likelihood of such disasters going forward. When it comes to poverty, even cautious estimates confirm that warming of 1.5 °C to 2 °C by 2050 could be devastating, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where climate catastrophe could trap 250­–500 million people in poverty for years or even decades more. Besides working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, what can we do to lessen the toll of climate change on the world’s poorest people? Make government assistance programs climate smart, suggests a new report from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Drawing on a review of 65 national and global studies, plus a survey of low-income people in India, the report recommends that governments reform social protection programs such as welfare and social services, cash transfers and job guarantees to deal directly with the challenge of climate change. Based on the previously published studies, IIED concluded that social protection programs in low-income countries tend to boost people’s resilience to climate-related risks such as drought. Existing social protection policies are typically most helpful when households need to handle risks that are relatively small and infrequent, or for aiding people as they attempt to bounce back better when climate shocks happen. Where today’s programs fall short, however, is in transformative resilience: helping households “fundamentally change” so they’re less vulnerable to climate shocks in the first place. To illustrate opportunities for reform, the researchers behind the report examined one of India’s top social protection programs, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), which promises paid work to rural households. In theory, the program guarantees 100 days of work and wages each year to any rural resident who wants it, although full implementation of the policy is uneven. While providing jobs to low-income people who are temporarily unemployed, the program provides… Read More

When it comes to poverty, even cautious estimates confirm that warming of 1.5 °C to 2 °C by 2050 could be devastating, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where climate catastrophe could trap 250­–500 million people in poverty for years or even decades more.

Make government assistance programs climate smart, suggests a new report from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

Drawing on a review of 65 national and global studies, plus a survey of low-income people in India, the report recommends that governments reform social protection programs such as welfare and social services, cash transfers and job guarantees to deal directly with the challenge of climate change.

Based on the previously published studies, IIED concluded that social protection programs in low-income countries tend to boost people’s resilience to climate-related risks such as drought. Existing social protection policies are typically most helpful when households need to handle risks that are relatively small and infrequent, or for aiding people as they attempt to bounce back better when climate shocks happen.

Where today’s programs fall short, however, is in transformative resilience: helping households “fundamentally change” so they’re less vulnerable to climate shocks in the first place.

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To illustrate opportunities for reform, the researchers behind the report examined one of India’s top social protection programs, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), which promises paid work to rural households. In theory, the program guarantees 100 days of work and wages each year to any rural resident who wants it, although full implementation of the policy is uneven. While providing jobs to low-income people who are temporarily unemployed, the program provides labor for infrastructure and other projects in rural areas.

To assess the impacts of MGNREGS, the researchers surveyed 651 low-income households in four Indian states: Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Sikkim. Of that group, 34% reported that the program helped them absorb climate-related shocks. Irrigation channels built by workers in the program, for example, helped drain farmable but waterlogged land after cyclones, while wages from MGNREGS employment helped families rebuild while keeping children enrolled in school. In the survey, 26% of MGNREGS beneficiaries reported even greater gains, saying that the program not only helped them handle individual shocks, but also enabled them to adapt to the changing climate.

Few of the people surveyed reported that MGNREGS enabled them to move beyond a state of vulnerability, however. To further improve people’s lives, the report recommends that policy-makers reform the program to account for climate change. This could entail paying wages that account for climate hazards, including the fact that households tend to need more income during droughts. It could also include training people in “climate-smart livelihoods” such as small-scale renewable energy efforts. Better coordination with government environmental programs could also boost sustainability while fighting poverty, the report suggests.

Today’s social protection policies already bring some measure of climate resilience to their beneficiaries. But it’s clear they can become even better.

“Such a creative shift is not only possible,” the report concludes, “it is a critical and obvious next step in a world whose people and communities, species and ecosystems are increasingly threatened by unprecedented climate challenges.”

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/climate-change-adaptation-poverty/feed/0Andrew UrevigThe multi-billion-dollar “climate services” industry is altering access to climate change data. Critics fear some may lose out.https://ensia.com/features/private-climate-services-industry-environmental-justice-corporations-inequity/
https://ensia.com/features/private-climate-services-industry-environmental-justice-corporations-inequity/#commentsFri, 02 Aug 2019 20:20:48 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26571How do we avoid a future in which the best data for saving lives and property from climate destruction are only available to those who can afford it? That’s the question some observers and critics of “climate services” are asking. The fast growth of this field in recent years marks a profound shift in how our society creates and uses science. Rather than focus broadly on the regional, national or global impacts of rising temperatures, providers of climate services create data tailored to specific decision-makers: the mayor of a coastal city, say, or the CEO of an energy utility. This field is spawning an industry of climate services companies that sense the potential for massive profits by selling customized data to clients who want to learn in explicit financial detail where and how much climate change will affect them. One of the industry’s leaders, a Silicon Valley executive named Rich Sorkin, made the case for climate services in May to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Environment. He argued that taking the big-picture climate science produced by federal agencies and turning it into hyperlocal threat assessments is a crucial and effective way for cities, states, companies and investors to better prepare for the climate emergency. The field’s growth “shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit.” –Svenja Keele Sorkin suggested that his risk-focused climate company Jupiter is uniquely suited to take on this job. “We believe the federal government should defer to the private sector in this area,” he said in a statement. That’s not a universally held opinion, however. Earlier this year, the journal Climatic Change devoted a special issue to climate services, which included tough questions from critics. University of Melbourne researcher Svenja Keele argued in one paper that the field’s growth “shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit.” University of Guelph assistant professor Eric Nost meanwhile asked, “when do climate services actually exacerbate existing vulnerabilities?” Sorkin argues that companies like his — which is part of an industry that… Read More

How do we avoid a future in which the best data for saving lives and property from climate destruction are only available to those who can afford it?

That’s the question some observers and critics of “climate services” are asking. The fast growthof this field in recent years marks a profound shift in how our society creates and uses science. Rather than focus broadly on the regional, national or global impacts of rising temperatures, providers of climate services create data tailored to specific decision-makers: the mayor of a coastal city, say, or the CEO of an energy utility.

This field is spawning an industry of climate services companies that sense the potential for massive profitsby selling customized datato clients who want to learn in explicit financial detail where and how much climate change will affect them.

One of the industry’s leaders, a Silicon Valley executive named Rich Sorkin, made the case for climate services in May to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Environment. He argued that taking the big-picture climate science produced by federal agencies and turning it into hyperlocal threat assessments is a crucial and effective way for cities, states, companies and investors to better prepare for the climate emergency.

The field’s growth “shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit.” –Svenja Keele

Sorkin suggested that his risk-focused climate company Jupiter is uniquely suited to take on this job. “We believe the federal government should defer to the private sector in this area,” he said in a statement.

That’s not a universally held opinion, however. Earlier this year, the journal Climatic Change devoted a special issue to climate services, which included tough questions from critics. University of Melbourne researcher Svenja Keele argued in one paperthat the field’s growth “shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit.”

Sorkin argues that companies like his — which is part of an industry that in 2015 was valuedglobally at US$2.6 billion with 6% to 10% growth per year — are nimble and innovative where government can be slow and cautious. “We’re years ahead of what the public sector is doing,” he says.

In his statement, he likenedJupiter’s impact on climate science to the disruptive influence of Amazon, Microsoft and Google on supercomputing: “In nearly every case, the private sector is leading the adoption of these new technologies, driven by brutal competition for profits.”

And for companies like his, those profits can be lucrative. Jupiter’s clients includeplayers in oil and gas, insurance and defense. A new customer can expect to payanywhere from US$200,000 to US$500,000 to learn how it is exposed to floods, heat, storms, fires and other impacts of climate change. A yearlong subscription could start at US$1 million, Sorkin says, “and for large corporations might be substantially more than that.”

Other companies are also trying to cash inon the financial fear and insecurity prompted by rising global temperatures and unpredictable weather.

Good for Society?

But with that has come questions about who actually gains.

“[Commercially developed climate services] are often exclusive and only accessible by those involved and/or paying for that service,” Marta Bruno Soares, a Met Office university academic fellow in the U.K., wrote in an email. “What is critical at this point is to understand how the climate services produced … are being licensed and what accessibility is allowed to whom.”

Even industry leaders acknowledge the risk of a not-so-distant future where the wealthy and powerful have better information and tools for protecting themselves from the devastation of climate change than the poor and vulnerable.

“That’s a huge concern, and I’m certainly not going to pretend that we have the solution,” says Emilie Mazzacurati, the founder and CEO of Four Twenty Seven, a California-based climate services company that was recently acquiredby Moody’s. When it comes to climate adaptation, she adds, “there is massive inequality and massive concerns over equity that we’re not going to solve with data.”

“Scientists were saying, ‘We knew this could happen,’” Mazzacurati says. “[There was] a disconnect between the available data and projections around risks from climate change and the fact that those were not systematically integrated for most organizations.”

“I think that is an extremely important issue that we are very mindful of trying to address,” says Sorkin. The company is looking at ways that it can aid those with fewer resources, such as working with U.S. communities to relocate awayfrom climate dangers instead of merely rebuildingafter disaster strikes.

“We’re not in a position to give away what we’re doing for free, but we do a pretty substantial amount of pro bono work,” he says.

Integrating Risks

Mazzacurati founded Four Twenty Seven after Hurricane Sandy devastated New York City in 2012. “What struck me most was the chaos that [an] extreme weather event could bring to one of the wealthiest, most organized, most resourceful cities in the world — and some of its most powerful businesses,” she later recalled.

With parts of Manhattan flooded and without electricity, she wondered why financial organizations in particular — which require a nuanced understanding of risk in order to survive — failed to prepare for an obvious climate threat.

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“Scientists were saying, ‘We knew this could happen,’” Mazzacurati says. “[There was] a disconnect between the available data and projections around risks from climate change and the fact that those were not systematically integrated for most organizations.”

Four Twenty Seven describes itself as a provider of “market intelligence.” But it operates on the assumption that corporations and investors that learn about hyper-specific dangers they face from climate change — whether that’s a factory exposed to flooding or a high-carbon investment that could devalue a portfolio — will not only protect their individual assets but push for wider climate solutions.

“We need both global policy action, and we need corporations to prepare for specific impacts,” Mazzacurati says. “The realization of how complex [and costly] those impacts are … should help motivate greater policy engagement.”

“When you change the narrative and you start discussing the impact that climate change will have on them rather than how evil they are … then you have a completely different conversation.” –Carlo Buontempo

While managing the climate services team at the Met Office Hadley Centre, Carlo Buontempodid a project on the impact of climate change on corporations and oil companies.

“When you change the narrative and you start discussing the impact that climate change will have on them rather than how evil they are … then you have a completely different conversation,” says Buontempo. “It’s likely to trigger action.”

But potentially only up to a point. In 2017, Royal Dutch Shell divestedUS$7.25 billion in investments from Canada’s oil sands after learning about the financial damage a market shift to lower-carbon energy could have on its business model. Yet around the same time the company spent US$53 billion acquiringthe fossil fuel giant BG Group, and The Economist recently reportedthat Shell is “earmarking most of its $30bn annual capital-expenditure budget over the five-year period [2021–2025] for fossil-fuel related projects.”

Replacement or Complement?

Critics wonder if it’s wise to assume that the self-interest of corporations and other powerful actors neatly align with the broader interests of society.

“We need to be alert to the possibility that [climate] service delivery models — couched in the language of entrepreneurialism, efficiency, utility, customisation and flexibilization — merely entrench the status quo … rather than support transformational and equitable responses to climate change,” wroteKeele in Climatic Change.

Who will ultimately benefit from this involvement — society at large, or the wealthy and well-connected?

Meanwhile, advocates question the underlying premise of such critiques: that the growth of climate services comes at the expense of traditional research. “We don’t replace the fundamental science that government scientists and agencies perform,” Mazzacurati says. “We’re users of the data and we help bring it to market.” In fact, the Trump administration’s attacks onU.S. climate science — including a proposal to slash US$1 billionfrom the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration alone — are unwelcome news to the industry.

“We’re very much … concerned over the budget cuts,” Mazzacurati says.

Still, Sorkin acknowledges that a private sector approach — at least on its own — isn’t likely to serve the needs of the planet’s most vulnerable. “We don’t really see underdeveloped communities or countries as profit generators for us,” he says. Those types of projects, he says, only make financial sense with the government or NGOs as partners.

Desperately Needed Shift

No matter which side you come down on, the fact is that decades of warnings from climate scientists haven’t yet produced the global action needed to avoid catastrophe. Buontempo says companies responding to narrow self-interest are one aspect of a desperately needed shift away from carbon-producing activities — along with strategies for dealing with the impacts we’re already locked into.

“The involvement of the private sector is for me inevitable,” he says. “There are not enough academics working on climate to develop all the services that a society needs at this stage.”

Whether or not that is the case, the question remains: Who will ultimately benefit from this involvement — society at large, or the wealthy and well-connected?

]]>https://ensia.com/features/private-climate-services-industry-environmental-justice-corporations-inequity/feed/3Geoff DembickiNuclear power offers an abundant supply of low-carbon energy. But what to do with the deadly radioactive waste?https://ensia.com/features/radioactive-nuclear-waste-disposal/
https://ensia.com/features/radioactive-nuclear-waste-disposal/#commentsWed, 31 Jul 2019 14:00:03 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26520There’s a small red hammer and sickle flag of the old Soviet Union on my dresser at home. I found it years ago on the floor of a primary school in Pripyat, the town built for workers at the doomed Chernobyl nuclear plant in what is now Ukraine. Perhaps it had been waved by a child at a state occasion, or had been left behind in the rush to evacuate Pripyat after the world’s worst nuclear disaster in April 1986. Less than 2 miles (3 kilometers) away, the stricken, crumbling Reactor No. 4 was one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Everything for miles around, from the mushrooms in the woods to the trucks left in the parking lots to the toys in the nursery and the hospital beds, was radioactive to some degree. Even though a dosimeter showed that after being washed down, the little flag was barely more radioactive than normal background levels found in nature, it should have been packaged up and landfilled as low-level nuclear waste. By contrast, Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 site will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years. In July 2019, 33 years after the explosion, 200 metric tons (220 tons) of uranium, plutonium, liquid fuel and irradiated dust was finally encased below an enormous 36,000-metric-ton (40,000-ton), €1.5 billion steel and concrete structure taller than the Statue of Liberty. The new sarcophagus will last about 100 years — after which it will deteriorate and future generations will have to decide how to dismantle and store it permanently. Skip forward to Cameron, Texas, on January 16, 2019. This was a nerve-wracking day for Liz Muller, co-founder of California startup technology company Deep Isolation and her father, Richard Muller, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and now chief technology officer at Deep Isolation. The father-daughter team had invited 40 nuclear scientists, U.S. Department of Energy officials, oil and gas professionals, and environmentalists to witness the first-ever attempt to test whether the latest oil-fracking technology could be used to permanently dispose of the most dangerous nuclear waste. At 11:30 a.m., the… Read More

There’s a small red hammer and sickle flag of the old Soviet Union on my dresser at home. I found it years ago on the floor of a primary school in Pripyat, the town built for workers at the doomed Chernobyl nuclear plant in what is now Ukraine. Perhaps it had been waved by a child at a state occasion, or had been left behind in the rush to evacuate Pripyat after the world’s worst nuclear disaster in April 1986.

Less than 2 miles (3 kilometers) away, the stricken, crumbling Reactor No. 4 was one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Everything for miles around, from the mushrooms in the woods to the trucks left in the parking lots to the toys in the nursery and the hospital beds, was radioactive to some degree.

Even though a dosimeter showed that after being washed down, the little flag was barely more radioactive than normal background levels found in nature, it should have been packaged up and landfilled as low-level nuclear waste.

By contrast, Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 site will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years. In July 2019, 33 years after the explosion, 200 metric tons (220 tons) of uranium, plutonium, liquid fuel and irradiated dust was finally encased below an enormous 36,000-metric-ton (40,000-ton), €1.5 billion steel and concrete structure taller than the Statue of Liberty. The new sarcophagus will last about 100 years — after which it will deteriorate and future generations will have to decide how to dismantle and store it permanently.

The new sarcophagus covering Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 is expected to remain functional for a century. Graphic courtesy of Berria from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Click to enlarge.

Skip forward to Cameron, Texas, on January 16, 2019. This was a nerve-wracking day for Liz Muller, co-founder of California startup technology company Deep Isolation and her father, Richard Muller, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and now chief technology officer at Deep Isolation.

The father-daughter team had invited 40 nuclear scientists, U.S. Department of Energy officials, oil and gas professionals, and environmentalists to witness the first-ever attempt to test whether the latest oil-fracking technology could be used to permanently dispose of the most dangerous nuclear waste.

At 11:30 a.m., the crew of oil workers used a wire cable to lower a 30-inch (80-centimeter)-long, 8-inch (20-centimeter)-wide 140-pound (64-kilogram) canister — filled with steel rather than radioactive waste — down a previously drilled borehole. Then, using a tool called a “tractor” invented by the industry to reach horizontally into mile-deep oil reservoirs, they pushed it 400 feet (120 meters) farther away from the borehole through the rock.

Five hours later, the crew used the tractor to relocate and collect the canister, attach it to the cable and pull it back to the surface — to the cheers of the workers. Until then, few people in the nuclear industry believed this could be done.

By avoiding the need to excavate large, expensive tunnels to store waste below ground, the Deep Isolation team believes it has found a solution to one of the world’s most intractable environmental problems — how to permanently dispose of and potentially retrieve the hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste presently being stored at nuclear power plants and research and military stations around the world.

“We showed it could be done,” Elizabeth Muller says. “Horizontal, directional drilling has come a long way recently. This is now an off-the-shelf technology. Using larger canisters, we think about 300 boreholes with tunnels up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) long would be able to take much of the U.S.’s high-level nuclear waste. We think we can reduce by two-thirds the cost of permanent storage.”

Workers lower a canister into a borehole in January 2019 as part of a test of a potential radioactive waste storage strategy developed by Deep Isolation, a California startup. Photo courtesy of Deep Isolation, Inc.

“We are using a technique that’s been made cheap over the last 20 years,” says Richard Muller, who has worked in the shale gas industry. “We realized we could put together the oil and nuclear technologies. One offered the solution to the other. These capsules can be lowered deep down, far deeper than anyone has proposed, and stored underneath a billion tons of rock so none of the radiation gets out.”

Great Stockpiles

The dilemma of how to manage nuclear waste — radioactive materials routinely produced in large quantities at every stage of nuclear power production, from uranium mining and enrichment to reactor operation and the reprocessing of spent fuel — has taxed the industry, academics and governments for decades. Along with accidents, it has been a major reason for continuing public opposition to the industry’s further expansion despite substantial interest in nuclear’s status as a low-carbon power source that can help mitigate climate change.

In 80-odd years of nuclear power, in which more than 450 commercial reactors, many experimental stations and tens of thousands of nuclear warheads have been built, great stockpiles of different levels of waste have accumulated.

Depending on how countries classify waste, only about 0.2–3% by volume is high-level waste, according to the World Nuclear Association, a London-based industry group that promotes nuclear power. Mostly derived from civil reactor fuel, this is some of the most dangerous material known on Earth, remaining radioactive for tens of thousands of years. It requires cooling and shielding indefinitely and contains 95% of the radioactivity related to nuclear power generation.

A further 7% or so by volume, known as intermediate waste, is made up of things like reactor components and graphite from reactor cores. This is also highly dangerous, but it can be stored in special canisters because it does not generate much heat.

The rest is made up of vast quantities of what is called low-level and very low level waste. This comprises scrap metal, paper, plastics, building materials and everything else radioactive involved in the operation and dismantling of nuclear facilities.

The consensus is that around 22,000 cubic meters (29,000 cubic yards) of solid high-level waste has accumulated in temporary storage but not been disposed of (moved to permanent storage) in 14 western countries, along with unknown amounts in China, Russia and at military stations. A further 460,000 cubic meters (600,000 cubic yards) of intermediate waste is being stored, and about 3.5 million cubic meters (4.6 million cubic yards) of low-level waste. Some 34,000 cubic meters (44,000 cubic yards) of new high-level and intermediate waste is generated each year by operating civil reactors, says another nuclear industry group, the World Nuclear Association (WNA).

High-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel storage is stored at 80 sites scattered across the U.S. Map courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy. Click to enlarge.

The U.S., with 59 nuclear power plants comprising 97 working civil reactors each generating at least several tons of high-level waste per year, has around 90,000 metric tons (99,000 tons) of high-level waste awaiting permanent disposal, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Although it’s impossible to come up with a global total because of differences in how quantities are measured and reported, and with some inventories kept secret, other countries harbor significant amounts of waste as well.

Many Ideas

In the early days of nuclear power, waste of any sort was barely considered. British, U.S. and Russian authorities, among others, dumped nuclear waste, including more than 150,000 metric tons (160,000 tons) of low-level waste at sea or in rivers. Since then, billions of dollars have been spent trying to identify how best to reduce the amount produced and then store it for what may be eternity.

Vertical boreholes up to 5,000 meters (16,000 feet) deep have also been proposed, and this option is said by some scientists to be promising. But there have been doubts because it is likely to be near impossible to retrieve waste from vertical boreholes.

Two scientific developments excite nuclear scientists. One is to build a new generation of advanced fast neutron reactors, which would use the high-level waste as fuel. This slowly emerging “Generation IV” nuclear power program is billed by the industry as safer and more efficient. But even though such reactors can reduce the degree of hazard the waste poses, they don’t solve the issue entirely.

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“These new reactors will still need a waste repository, likely as large as a repository for the waste produced by the current crop of conventional reactors,” says Allison MacFarlane, director of the Institute for International Science and Technical Policy at The George Washington University and chair of the U.S. nuclear regulatory commission in 2012–14.

The other technology that could reduce waste, known as transmutation, aims to reduce radiotoxicity by using lasers to change the composition of dangerous waste. It has been investigated for decades in the U.K., U.S., Sweden and elsewhere but without great success.

“Nuclear energy may be the best candidate for the future, but we are still left with a lot of dangerous junk.” – Gérard MourouBut the idea was boosted in December 2018 by French Nobel prize–­winning physicist Gérard Mourou, who, in his acceptance lecture, said laser beams millions of times brighter than the surface of the sun in bursts that last a millionth of a billionth of a second had the potential to neutralize nuclear waste, reducing its half-life to a few years and its radioactivity to very little.

“Nuclear energy may be the best candidate for the future, but we are still left with a lot of dangerous junk. The idea is to transmute this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms which don’t have the problem of radioactivity. What you have to do is to change the makeup of the nucleus,” he said in the lecture.

But Mourou accepted that it might take decades before this “extreme light” solution could be deployed to destroy nuclear waste on an industrial scale.

“No Reliable Method”

After decades of civil nuclear power and billions of dollars spent researching different geological sites and ways to best dispose of the waste, the problems are both technical and political, and the consensus of governments and industry is that deep burial is the best solution — at least for the moment.

Yet, so far, no country has managed to build a deep repository for high-level waste.

“Although almost every nuclear country has, in principle, plans for the eventual burial of the most radioactive waste, only a handful have made any progress and nowhere in the world is there operating an authorized site for the deep geological disposal of the highest level radioactive waste,” says Andrew Blowers, author of The Legacy of Nuclear Power and a former member of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CORWM) set up to advise the U.K. government on how and where to site and store nuclear waste.

“Currently no options have been able to demonstrate that waste will remain isolated from the environment over the tens to hundreds of thousands of years. There is no reliable method to warn future generations about the existence of nuclear waste dumps,” he says.

“The nuclear legacy stretches into the far future; it poses a risk to environments and human health for periods which extend well beyond our comprehension. Radioactive waste is the Achilles heel of the industry,” says Blowers.

Deep inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada, mining machines have carved chambers for storing nuclear waste — but the facility has yet to be licensed or used. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy

The U.S., has come closest with a single deep repository. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico is a 2,150-foot (655-meter)-deep complex for the disposal of “transuranic” waste, or long-lived intermediate level waste, mostly deriving from military bomb-making.

By law, however, all high-level U.S. nuclear waste must go to Yucca Mountain in Nevada, since 1987 the designated deep geological repository about 90 miles (140 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas. But the site has been met with continued legal, regulatory and constitutional challenges, becoming a political yo-yo since it was identified as a potentially suitable repository. It is fiercely opposed by the Western Shoshone peoples, Nevada state and others.

A massive tunnel was excavated in Yucca Mountain but was never licensed and the site is now largely abandoned — to the frustration of the federal government and the nuclear industry, which has raised more than US$41 billion from a levy on consumer bills to pay for the repository and which must pay for heavy security at their temporary nuclear waste storage sites.

“We need a high-level repository. We are holding waste now at about 121 sites across the U.S.,” says Baker Elmore, director of federal programs at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “This costs the taxpayer US$800 million a year. We have 97 [nuclear] plants operating and the amount of waste is only going to grow. We are not allowing the science to play out here. There is US$41 billion in the government’s nuclear waste fund, and Yucca mountain is scientifically sound. We want a decision. We are going to need more than one repository.”

He is supported by U.S. energy secretary Rick Perry. “We have a moral and national security obligation to come up with a long-term solution, finding the safest repositories available. … [W]e can no longer kick the can down the road,” he said at a senate hearing in June 2017.

Painfully Slow

Political and community opposition to plans has made progress painfully slow in most countries. In the U.K., the government has offered communities money, but has been unable to persuade any local authority to host a permanent deep repository. Massive protests in France and Germany helped fuel the political rise of the Green Party and have indefinitely delayed or stopped work on proposed repositories.

Only Finland is close to completing a deep repository for high-level waste. Only Finland is close to completing a deep repository for high-level waste. In May, work started on an “encapsulation” plant where waste will be packed inside copper canisters that will be transferred into 400- to 450-meter (1,300- to 1,500-foot)-deep underground tunnels. But doubt has been cast on the long-term safety of the canisters.

“The problem is intractable,” says Paul Dorfman, founder of the Nuclear Consulting Group, a group of around 120 international academics and independent experts in the fields of radiation waste, nuclear policy and environmental risk. “The bitter reality is that there is no scientifically proven way of disposing of the existential problem of high- and intermediate-level waste. Some countries have built repositories, some plan them. But given the huge technical uncertainties, if disposal does go ahead and anything goes wrong underground in the next millennia, then future generations risk profound widespread pollution.”

Many people now doubt that a satisfactory final repository will ever be found.

“Managing the nuclear legacy is not just a technical issue but a social one,” says Blowers. “The truth is that whatever efforts are made to bury and forget it, it will not go away. For the foreseeable future, the future is the safe and secure storage that is already in situ [at nuclear plants]. In the longer term better options may materialize.”

“Given the time scales involved there is no need to hurry. Society can and should take its time dealing with its nuclear legacy,” he says.

Liz and Richard Muller, for their part, are undaunted and eager to speed up the process. “We are approaching other countries and they are interested,” says Liz Muller. “We are confident we can provide them with another option.”

]]>https://ensia.com/features/radioactive-nuclear-waste-disposal/feed/24John VidalLooking for climate-friendly foods? Try protein powder, peanuts, tuna, salmon — and grasshoppershttps://ensia.com/notable/climate-friendly-food/
https://ensia.com/notable/climate-friendly-food/#respondTue, 30 Jul 2019 20:11:40 +0000https://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26538We hear a lot about how different food choices influence the climate crisis. But exactly how much does each bite you eat heat the planet? The answer depends on how you do the math. With demand for plant-based foods on the rise, a study published in the journal Sustainability offers a new way to measure the climate cost of different foods. Like most estimates, the new math assesses greenhouse gas emissions throughout a meal’s life cycle, from cropland to landfill. But the method also looks at the quality of protein, and tries to rate environmental impact with serving size in mind. In crunching the numbers, the study points to protein powders as one of the more climate-friendly ways to get the nutrient in your diet. Peanuts, tuna, salmon and grasshoppers also score well. Coming in with a big carbon footprint, however, are cheeses, grains, beef and white rice. Compared with prior findings, the new ranking paints a more positive picture of some foods, like protein powder. Other foods, such as spaghetti, come out looking worse for the climate under this math. Why the differences? After scientists estimate the emissions that come from every stage of making a given food, a big decisions remains: how to compare different items. Ranking foods based on the emissions per gram — or some other unit of mass — is one typical way, but the researchers say that weight doesn’t reflect the nuances of nutrition. “For instance, comparing beef against broccoli on a per-kilogram basis would be inappropriate,” they write, “given that both are usually eaten in different amounts and for different reasons.” To analyze the amounts people actually eat, the study compares climate impacts using the standard serving sizes developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As for the reasons people eat certain foods? Getting nutrients like protein is a big one, particularly for climate-conscious consumers trying to avoid meat products. But the nutritional point of consuming protein is to digest amino acids, molecules that make up proteins and help the body function. To get an accurate assessment, the researchers assess the amount of a particular… Read More

We hear a lot about how different food choices influence the climate crisis. But exactly how much does each bite you eat heat the planet? The answer depends on how you do the math.

With demand for plant-based foods on the rise, a study published in the journal Sustainability offers a new way to measure the climate cost of different foods. Like most estimates, the new math assesses greenhouse gas emissions throughout a meal’s life cycle, from cropland to landfill. But the method also looks at the quality of protein, and tries to rate environmental impact with serving size in mind.

In crunching the numbers, the study points to protein powders as one of the more climate-friendly ways to get the nutrient in your diet. Peanuts, tuna, salmon and grasshoppers also score well. Coming in with a big carbon footprint, however, are cheeses, grains, beef and white rice.

Compared with prior findings, the new ranking paints a more positive picture of some foods, like protein powder. Other foods, such as spaghetti, come out looking worse for the climate under this math.

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Why the differences? After scientists estimate the emissions that come from every stage of making a given food, a big decisions remains: how to compare different items. Ranking foods based on the emissions per gram — or some other unit of mass — is one typical way, but the researchers say that weight doesn’t reflect the nuances of nutrition.

“For instance, comparing beef against broccoli on a per-kilogram basis would be inappropriate,” they write, “given that both are usually eaten in different amounts and for different reasons.”

To analyze the amounts people actually eat, the study compares climate impacts using the standard serving sizes developed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

As for the reasons people eat certain foods? Getting nutrients like protein is a big one, particularly for climate-conscious consumers trying to avoid meat products.

But the nutritional point of consuming protein is to digest amino acids, molecules that make up proteins and help the body function. To get an accurate assessment, the researchers assess the amount of a particular amino acid that’s actually absorbed, a metric called the digestible indispensable amino acid score (DIAAS).

These new rankings add to our knowledge of how our diets influence climate change. But while the study’s results can be the basis for quick comparisons, the researchers note that their findings are just a draft, “subject to change.”

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/climate-friendly-food/feed/0Andrew UrevigWhy are harmful flame-retardant chemicals still showing up in children’s toys?https://ensia.com/features/why-are-harmful-flame-retardant-chemicals-still-showing-up-in-childrens-toys/
https://ensia.com/features/why-are-harmful-flame-retardant-chemicals-still-showing-up-in-childrens-toys/#respondFri, 26 Jul 2019 19:07:03 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26487Environmental and children’s health advocates breathed a sigh of relief when, over a decade ago, U.S. manufacturers began to phase out a number of flame retardant chemicals from furniture, electronics, textiles and other everyday items. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, were facing increasing scrutiny (and some had already been banned in parts of Europe) for impacts on children’s brain development, hormone disruption, reduced fertility, and other adverse health effects, as well as for their ubiquity in the environment and persistence in the food chain. Today, though, these chemicals — which include tetra-, penta-, hexa-, hepta- and decaBDE; named according to the number of bromine atoms attached, but all are structurally similar and all tend to bioaccumulate — continue to turn up in people’s lives in everyday plastics, from kitchen utensils to children’s toys, but not because they’re still being used intentionally. Rather, they are inadvertently making their way into our lives as hitchhikers in products made from recycled plastics that contain them. How exactly chemicals migrate from the plastic into our bodies is an ongoing area of study — do we absorb them through direct contact with the products? Ingest them somehow, or inhale? Studies done on these questions haven’t focused specifically on recycled products, but researchers have repeatedly found that products containing PBDEs release the chemicals into the air and onto dust; families then absorb them through simply breathing indoor air or through their skin by touching household dust. There’s little reason to think that whether a product contains PBDEs through recycled or new plastic makes any difference to how people may be exposed to the substances. Meanwhile, experts say there are better ways to recycle in order to, among other things, reduce the potential risks from chemical additives. It’s a boomerang effect, says Karolína Brabcová, consumer campaigns coordinator for the Czech environmental organization Arnika. Also a parent, Brabcová is alarmed by the risks these chemicals pose for children in particular. Decades of research has suggested links between PBDEs and neurological deficits, among other health impacts. “It’s the children who are most sensitive to it,” she says. “If a… Read More

Environmental and children’s health advocates breathed a sigh of relief when, over a decade ago, U.S. manufacturers began to phase out a number of flame retardant chemicals from furniture, electronics, textiles and other everyday items. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, were facing increasing scrutiny (and some had already been banned in parts of Europe) for impacts onchildren’s brain development, hormone disruption, reduced fertility, and other adverse health effects, as well as for theirubiquity in the environment and persistence in the food chain.

Today, though, these chemicals — which include tetra-, penta-, hexa-, hepta- and decaBDE; named according to the number of bromine atoms attached, but all are structurally similar and all tend to bioaccumulate — continue to turn up in people’s lives in everyday plastics, from kitchen utensils to children’s toys, but not because they’re still being used intentionally. Rather, they are inadvertently making their way into our lives as hitchhikers in products made from recycled plastics that contain them.

How exactly chemicals migrate from the plastic into our bodies is an ongoing area of study — do we absorb them through direct contact with the products? Ingest them somehow, or inhale? Studies done on these questions haven’t focused specifically on recycled products, but researchers have repeatedly found that products containing PBDEs release the chemicals into the air and onto dust; families then absorb them through simply breathing indoor air or through their skin by touching household dust. There’s little reason to think that whether a product contains PBDEs through recycled or new plastic makes any difference to how people may be exposed to the substances. Meanwhile, experts say there are better ways to recycle in order to, among other things, reduce the potential risks from chemical additives.

It’s a boomerang effect, says Karolína Brabcová, consumer campaigns coordinator for the Czech environmental organizationArnika. Also a parent, Brabcová is alarmed by the risks these chemicals pose for children in particular. Decades of research has suggested links between PBDEs and neurological deficits, among other health impacts.

“It’s the children who are most sensitive to it,” she says. “If a baby is affected by these chemicals, there’s no way to repair it.”

Arnika contributed to areport published in April byIPEN, a global network of NGOs focused on chemicals, which found PBDEs in children’s toys, hair accessories and other plastic products nearly everywhere they were tested, from Japan and Canada to the European Union and Brazil. It’s not a matter of price or quality; these chemicals can be in name-brand products just as much as generic or knockoff alternatives. The chemicals turn up most routinely in black plastic simply because that color is more likely to contain recycled plastic — it doesn’t need to be labeled as such, and in fact often isn’t — although they can and have appeared in other colors of plastic as well.

The IPEN report follows previous studies, such as one conducted in 2014 by researchers from the University of Antwerp that concluded, “Most likely, recycled materials are an important source of these additives in toys and therefore, their (re)use in products for children should be subject to stricter restrictions.”

“We just don’t know what’s in [these products] and there’s no way to find out,” says Brabcová. “The recyclers don’t know, the companies that sell the product have no idea because there’s no label, and there’s no way to follow these chemicals in the supply chain.”

That, she says, is the heart of the problem: Even when hazardous chemicals become regulated or restricted, the products that already contain them are not. Long-lasting chemicals like PBDEs persist in products and in the environment, and tend to bioaccumulate in people’s bodies, even after public outcries over their health effects and media buzz around new regulations die down.

“There’s not some sort of magic hole where they disappear,” says Andrew Turner, associate professor of marine geochemistry and pollution science at the University of Plymouth in England who published apaper last year on chemicals found in recycled black plastic. PBDEs and other substances are still with us, he says. “They’re just being incidentally put into all sorts of new products.”

PBDEs were detected in this toy gun bought in France at 1080 parts per million (ppm). To protect health, researchers and advocates have called for a limit of 50 ppm — with no amount proven safe. Photo courtesy of Marketa Sediva/Arnika Association (Czech Republic)

Just how wide-reaching and unpredictable the issue has become is exactly what the IPEN study was designed to illustrate, says Joe DiGangi, senior science and technical advisor at IPEN. “These flame retardant chemicals are ending up in products where they have no functional purpose,” he says. “When they appear there as a result of the recycling process, it illustrates quite clearly how that process results in a loss of control of those chemicals.”

This, DiGangi says, is a chief concern — the lack of data or any kind of tracking system for understanding which substances end up where. “If you’re not controlling for it or removing it deliberately, it will just go along for the ride,” he says.

And there are plenty of other chemicals that may also be present in recycled plastic that don’t need to be, including organophosphate flame retardant chemicals, which largely replaced PBDEs when they were phased out in new products, as well as things like BPA and phthalates — and potentially whatever the newest generation of concerning chemicals turns out to be.

Does It Need to Be This Way?

Advocates argue that it doesn’t need to be this way. There are policy and technological fixes to at least partially address the problem, but they are costly. For Arnika and other health and environmental organizations, a main focus of their attention isthe Stockholm Convention.

What Are POPs?Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are organic chemical substances, that is, they are carbon-based. They possess a particular combination of physical and chemical properties such that, once released into the environment, they:

remain intact for exceptionally long periods of time (many years);

become widely distributed throughout the environment as a result of natural processes involving soil, water and, most notably, air;

accumulate in the fatty tissue of living organisms including humans, and are found at higher concentrations at higher levels in the food chain; and

The 2001 international treaty governs persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and has banned or restricted a number of brominated flame retardants — but it allows for exemptions for recycled products. The treaty’s expert committee on chemicals reviewed the recycling exemptions and reported the following year: “Failure to [eliminate brominated diphenyl ethers from the recycling streams as swiftly as possible] will inevitably result in wider human and environmental contamination and the dispersal of brominated diphenyl ethers into matrices from which recovery is not technically or economically feasible and in the loss of the long‑term credibility of recycling.”

DiGangi calls it a “double standard” to restrict chemicals in new but not recycled products. “Limits for new products are more stringent than those for recycled products,” he says. “That’s poisoning the circular economy.”

IPEN has called for the treaty to end the recycling exemptions, which are currently held by governments including the EU, Brazil, Canada, Japan and South Korea specifically for pentaBDE and octaBDE. The EU also has an exemption for combined totals for all PBDEs. (The U.S. is not party to the Stockholm Convention so doesn’t have exemptions; U.S. government and industry interests alike, though, may attend meetings as observers, giving them the opportunity for lobbying despite not being part of the official process.)

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“A toxic chemical does not become less toxic when it is recycled,” Giulia Carlini, staff attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, which has criticized the treaty’s stance on PBDEs, said in apress release in April. “The chemicals listed in the Stockholm Convention are the world’s worst chemicals.”

The health concerns related to recycled plastics extend beyond PBDEs. Dioxins, which are by-products of the flame retardants, can be present in the initial product or formedwhen the plastic is heated as part of the recycling process. Dioxins have been definitively shown to harm human health (as well as other animals), with arange of impacts at nearly every stage of development, including disrupting normal nervous system development, and impairing endocrine, immune and reproductive functions. While brominated dioxins are not listed under the Stockholm Convention, closely related chlorinated dioxins (which have been studied more extensively) are. When IPEN called for the recycling exemptions to be removed from the treaty, it also called for brominated dioxins to be added.

Solutions

PBDEs and dioxins in recycled plastics can, for the most part, be traced toelectronics recycling. It’s a largely unregulated industry with little oversight — which results in serious and myriad health hazards for workers and local water supplies. This also means there’s little documentation of where different materials end up after they’re separated out from each computer, television and throwaway gadget. One 2015study, for example, found that in Nigeria, one destination for developed countries’ electronic waste, a sample of nearly 240,000 metric tons (265,000 tons) of plastic from discarded televisions would contain almost 2,500 metric tons (2,800 tons) of octaBDE and decaBDE.

PBDEs were detected in this headband bought in Portugal at 2526 ppm. To protect health, researchers and advocates have called for a limit of 50 ppm — with no amount proven safe. Photo courtesy of Marketa Sediva/Arnika Association (Czech Republic)

The recycling process becomes a rich source of cheap black plastic. Aided by fast-moving global trade, these materials find their way into the faceless commodity market, and ultimately into products that consumers surround themselves with but give little thought to: hair clips, kitchen utensils, key fobs, children’s toys and more.

Inside the body, the chemicals operate gradually and invisibly; the health impacts they’re associated with don’t give early warning signs, and once the damage is done, it’s irreversible.

“If you see plastic pollution in oceans, it strikes you really easily, but this type of pollution is not as easy to grab. But you see the consequences [eventually],” says Brabcová.

For Miriam Diamond, earth sciences professor at the University of Toronto, it’s frustrating that PBDEs remain in circulation because of a lack of will, rather than lack of ability. They are not simple or cheap, but methods do exist for removing additives like PBDEs from plastics during recycling, and for destroying them safely. And those methods can also avoid releasing dioxins, for example, by not using combustion.

“All this is technologically possible, but it’s not economically feasible,” she says.

DiGangi says there are devices that can be used to separate plastics containing different chemicals — it’s how his colleagues did the study on hair clips and children’s toys — but there’s a simpler, low-tech way to sort them. Plastics with bromine are denser than those without, allowing them to sink in water, he says, and waste handlers in India already use this as a separation strategy.

“If waste handlers in India are able to separate these plastics using the sink-float method, I think any developed country can do it,” he says.

He points out that most countries in the world do not have the recycling exemptions to the Stockholm Convention. (Only seven governments do, though that includes the EU, representing its 28 member countries.) But products move so freely around the world, any countries that allow the continued use of these products open the door for them to end up anywhere. “It extends beyond the [six countries and the EU] that have asked for the exemption. And nobody knows where it is until you test for it,” he says.

PBDEs were detected in this toy car bought in Montenegro at 1805 ppm. To protect health, researchers and advocates have called for a limit of 50 ppm — with no amount proven safe. Photo courtesy of Marketa Sediva/Arnika Association (Czech Republic)

About the exemptions, Charlie Avis, spokesperson for the secretariat for the Stockholm Convention wrote in an email, “Exemptions and acceptable purposes give Parties the time that may be needed to adapt and take the necessary measures required by the Convention, in order to reduce or eliminate releases of POPs. This could be through finding alternatives, phase out of uses of POPs or other measures. … This is a dynamic issue, with numerous decisions related to exemptions and acceptable purposes having been adopted by the Conference of the Parties.”

DiGangi says that while that period of time is typically five years, governments agreed that the recycling exemptions could last until 2030 with a plan to review the exemptions in 2021.

Meanwhile, there’s really no way for average consumers to know which chemicals a given product contains. But as a practical tip for reducing contact with PBDEs and perhaps other chemicals carried over from a plastic product’s previous life, Turner advises people to avoid black plastic where possible.

Beyond such practical advice, Diamond is acutely focused on the bigger picture, and the continued use of all theother chemicals that haven’t been sufficiently studied or regulated at all yet.

“We also need to work as quickly as possible to restrict new uses [of inadequately tested chemicals],” she says. But this is an issue she connects to how much the economy has come to depend on product turnover and replacement — which is a much larger question than the PBDEs — similarly, with no simple fix. “Selling more stuff is the root of economic prosperity, and we haven’t figured out a way to be sufficiently prosperous without polluting ourselves.”

]]>https://ensia.com/features/why-are-harmful-flame-retardant-chemicals-still-showing-up-in-childrens-toys/feed/0Rachel CernanskyLooking to finance money-saving energy efficiency projects? Here’s a tool for that.https://ensia.com/notable/financing-energy-efficiency/
https://ensia.com/notable/financing-energy-efficiency/#respondWed, 24 Jul 2019 17:17:59 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26457Commercial buildings represent nearly one-fifth of total energy consumption in the U.S., and industrial consumption takes up another third. In the public sector, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that state and local government buildings could reduce annual energy costs by US$6 billion just by boosting energy performance by 20%. One major barrier to reducing consumption is finding the money to fund energy projects. That’s what the Better Buildings Initiative’s new tool, called the Financing Navigator, is intended to do. The navigator provides options and information for financing energy efficiency in commercial, health care, higher education, industrial, public sector and multifamily buildings. For each category, it provides a fact sheet that outlines common financing options as well as common barriers different companies or individuals might experience. For example, owners of multifamily buildings commonly use lease financing or power purchase agreements for these types of projects, but often lack technical expertise about financing and face personal restrictions on debt and loan amounts. Companies in the industrial sector often use internal funding or loans to pay for energy projects but have competing budget priorities and hesitate to take on more debt. There are also fact sheets for each type of financing supported by the tool — and there are many. Some, like an efficiency-as-a-service plan, allow the customer to contract for the use of equipment and pay lower energy costs immediately. Others, like on-bill financing, provide direct funding for the customer to install the equipment. Some plans stay with the building if it’s sold, others have lower interest rates, some involve the utility company, and others involve private lenders Beyond the fact sheets, the interactive tool allows users to plug in the specifics of a project and see the best options. The tool asks questions about type of customer, cost, who owns the building and more. It also asks about preferences: Do you want a long-term or short-term financing contract? How quickly do you need it? How complex of a financing structure are you willing to have? Once the questions are answered, it generates a comparison chart of options that match the… Read More

Commercial buildings represent nearly one-fifth of total energy consumption in the U.S., and industrial consumption takes up another third. In the public sector, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that state and local government buildings could reduce annual energy costs by US$6 billion just by boosting energy performance by 20%.

One major barrier to reducing consumption is finding the money to fund energy projects. That’s what the Better Buildings Initiative’s new tool, called the Financing Navigator, is intended to do.

The navigator provides options and information for financing energy efficiency in commercial, health care, higher education, industrial, public sector and multifamily buildings. For each category, it provides a fact sheet that outlines common financing options as well as common barriers different companies or individuals might experience.

There are also fact sheets for each type of financing supported by the tool — and there are many. Some, like an efficiency-as-a-service plan, allow the customer to contract for the use of equipment and pay lower energy costs immediately.

Others, like on-bill financing, provide direct funding for the customer to install the equipment. Some plans stay with the building if it’s sold, others have lower interest rates, some involve the utility company, and others involve private lenders

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Beyond the fact sheets, the interactive tool allows users to plug in the specifics of a project and see the best options. The tool asks questions about type of customer, cost, who owns the building and more. It also asks about preferences: Do you want a long-term or short-term financing contract? How quickly do you need it? How complex of a financing structure are you willing to have?

Once the questions are answered, it generates a comparison chart of options that match the user’s requirements and wants, and also links to approved, reliable providers that can begin financing the project.

For customers who may need help navigating the world of renewable energy financing, this tool provides an opportunity to see all the options in one place — and maybe finally start that energy project that’s been waiting in the wings.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/financing-energy-efficiency/feed/0Hannah BernsteinOpinion: Calling all hackers — endangered wildlife needs youhttps://ensia.com/voices/hackers-endangered-wildlife-online-trade/
https://ensia.com/voices/hackers-endangered-wildlife-online-trade/#commentsTue, 23 Jul 2019 12:54:45 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=voices&p=26437In recent months, there’s been a global push to get tech companies to help combat terrorist activities — to make it harder for terrorists to communicate and publicize their heinous attacks online. We need the same kind of resolute effort — led by hackers and savvy computer users — to fight illegal hunting and trading. All around the world, forests and other ecosystems are falling silent. Their wildlife populations having been decimated to feed burgeoning global markets for ivory, rhino horn, tiger parts, exotic pets and many other wild-animal products. Much of the illegal trade is happening online. That means that computer-literate folks have an exceptional opportunity to help combat the epic slaughter of Earth’s rarest and most spectacular species by calling out, harassing and disrupting illegal traders. Online Trading The trade in illegal wildlife and wildlife parts is estimated to be worth over US$23 billion per year, making it one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world. It affects thousands of species — not only elephants and rhinos but big cats, hornbills, orangutans, gorillas, songbirds, sharks, lizards, frogs and rare plants such as orchids. Most countries have signed up to CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora — which makes it illegal to trade in imperiled animals and plants. But illegal trade just keeps growing. A key reason is that the Internet has transformed global markets — allowing consumers to buy almost anything anywhere, while remaining relatively anonymous and communicating across territorial borders with ease. In Thailand, for instance, a recent report by the wildlife group TRAFFIC found 200 wildlife species openly for sale on Facebook — more than half of which are protected by Thai law. Most of the illegal trade is happening right before our eyes — on legitimate internet-auction sites such as eBay and Alibaba, in classified online ads, and in social-media chat rooms. (Some is superficially masked using code words to sell illegal ivory and other illicit wildlife items.) Hackers and even those with basic computer skills could have a big impact by searching out… Read More

In recent months, there’s been a global push to get tech companies to help combat terrorist activities — to make it harder for terrorists to communicate and publicize their heinous attacks online. We need the same kind of resolute effort — led by hackers and savvy computer users — to fight illegal hunting and trading.

All around the world, forests and other ecosystems are falling silent. Their wildlife populations having been decimated to feed burgeoning global markets for ivory, rhino horn, tiger parts, exotic pets and many other wild-animal products.

Much of the illegal trade is happening online. That means that computer-literate folks have an exceptional opportunity to help combat the epic slaughter of Earth’s rarest and most spectacular species by calling out, harassing and disrupting illegal traders.

Online Trading

The trade in illegal wildlife and wildlife parts is estimated to be worth over US$23 billion per year, making it one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world. It affects thousands of species — not only elephants and rhinos but big cats, hornbills, orangutans, gorillas, songbirds, sharks, lizards, frogs and rare plants such as orchids.

Most countries have signed up to CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora — which makes it illegal to trade in imperiled animals and plants. But illegal trade just keeps growing. A key reason is that the Internet has transformed global markets — allowing consumers to buy almost anything anywhere, while remaining relatively anonymous and communicating across territorial borders with ease. In Thailand, for instance, a recent report by the wildlife group TRAFFIC found 200 wildlife species openly for sale on Facebook — more than half of which are protected by Thai law.

Most of the illegal trade is happening right before our eyes — on legitimate internet-auction sites such as eBay and Alibaba, in classified online ads, and in social-media chat rooms. (Some is superficially masked using code words to sell illegal ivory and other illicit wildlife items.) Hackers and even those with basic computer skills could have a big impact by searching out illegal traders and making the tech companies that own the online sites aware of them — and then pressuring the companies to shut the illegal traders down.

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Once they are alerted to the problem, many tech companies are willing to help such efforts. For example, the giant online trader Alibaba recently signed an agreement with TRAFFIC pledging zero tolerance of the illegal wildlife trade. But making such promises is easy. Identifying the bad guys, and pressuring tech companies to make good on their promises to ban them, is the part that takes diligence and determination.

Computer hackers, who often have elite skills, could attack illegal traders in additional ways. While we don’t advocate illegal activity, we would not shed many tears if illicit traders found themselves hamstrung by disruptive strategies that hackers have used effectively in the past.

Heroic Hackers

We need hackers and other computer users to attack illegal wildlife trading — both because the black trade is growing so fast, and because the Internet is so integral to its operation.

Illegal traders can be very difficult to prosecute directly because they must be caught with protected species in their possession to be charged with a crime. And even if convicted, the penalties are often little more than a slap on the wrist.

But by subverting their ability to use the Internet to connect with their buyers, we could make their activities much harder. We don’t have to stop the trade entirely — just throw sand in their gears often enough that it becomes harder and less profitable. That could force many traders out of business. Even those driven onto the Dark Web — where encryption and a lack of searchability is the norm — would find their trade greatly diminished.

Bottom line: The illegal wildlife trade is rated by experts as one of the greatest of all threats to biodiversity. Hackers and other computer users who want to make a difference can play a vital role in helping to save nature and many of our most spectacular species. Let’s do it.

Editor’s note: The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily of Ensia. We present ​them to further discussion around important topics. ​We encourage you to respond with a comment below following our commenting guidelines, which can be found on this page. ​In addition, you might consider​ ​submitting a Voices piece of your own. See Ensia’s Contact page for submission guidelines.

]]>https://ensia.com/voices/hackers-endangered-wildlife-online-trade/feed/1William LauranceAs the climate heats up, efforts to build more resilient communities go beyond infrastructurehttps://ensia.com/features/community-resilience-north-america/
https://ensia.com/features/community-resilience-north-america/#respondFri, 19 Jul 2019 17:37:13 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26404On a 2015 flight to New Mexico, Lane Johnson looked out the airplane window on the sprawling suburbs of Albuquerque and was struck by the sight of the Rio Grande, the thin ribbon of freshwater on which the region relies to survive. Johnson, a researcher from Minnesota who studies tree rings to model and reconstruct fires, had recently taken a job in Santa Fe with the U.S. Geological Survey because the arid Southwest presented a trove of professional opportunity. It also raised some questions. What makes the American Southwest a good place for fire research makes it a pretty bad place for much else. It’s prone to drought, limited in freshwater sources and precipitation, and home to some of the highest average annual temperatures in the country. It also has a population growth rate that’s been at least twice as high as the rest of the country since the 1950s. In the face of a changing climate, these challenges will only become greater. “It’s a delicate position that many hundreds of thousands of people have put themselves in,” Johnson says. Growing up in the Great Lakes region, Johnson says the lack of water in New Mexico concerned him. “There’s always that unsettling feeling of — by being there, am I contributing to the problem that I’m concerned about?” he says. “That maybe we’re at our carrying capacity in the Southwest, or beyond it if something related to water supply were to go poorly.” As he settled into his job and his new life in Santa Fe, Johnson began wondering whether and how Albuquerque could bounce back in the face of environmental crisis — and whether any place can really be resilient to the challenges posed by climate change. So, earlier this year, when Ensia put out a call to its readers for questions they wanted the magazine to report on, Johnson wrote in with what he’d come to realize was a very personal set of questions: “What does community resilience look like, and how can it be created and enhanced? Where are the most resilient communities in North America?” How… Read More

On a 2015 flight to New Mexico, Lane Johnson looked out the airplane window on the sprawling suburbs of Albuquerque and was struck by the sight of the Rio Grande, the thin ribbon of freshwater on which the region relies to survive. Johnson, a researcher from Minnesota who studies tree rings to model and reconstruct fires, had recently taken a job in Santa Fe with the U.S. Geological Survey because the arid Southwest presented a trove of professional opportunity. It also raised some questions.

What makes the American Southwest a good place for fire research makes it a pretty bad place for much else. It’s prone to drought, limited in freshwater sources and precipitation, and home to some of the highest average annual temperatures in the country. It also has a population growth rate that’s been at least twice as high as the rest of the country since the 1950s. In the face of a changing climate, these challenges will only become greater.

“It’s a delicate position that many hundreds of thousands of people have put themselves in,” Johnson says. Growing up in the Great Lakes region, Johnson says the lack of water in New Mexico concerned him. “There’s always that unsettling feeling of — by being there, am I contributing to the problem that I’m concerned about?” he says. “That maybe we’re at our carrying capacity in the Southwest, or beyond it if something related to water supply were to go poorly.”

As he settled into his job and his new life in Santa Fe, Johnson began wondering whether and how Albuquerque could bounce back in the face of environmental crisis — and whether any place can really be resilient to the challenges posed by climate change.

So, earlier this year, when Ensia put out a call to its readers for questions they wanted the magazine to report on, Johnson wrote in with what he’d come to realize was a very personal set of questions: “What does community resilience look like, and how can it be created and enhanced? Where are the most resilient communities in North America?”

How Communities Respond to Change

The first part of answering these questions was to define resilience. In an explainerpublished in May, Ensia contributor Kate Knuth shows that scientists, researchers and practitioners in various fields have interpreted the question differently, but all tend to associate resilience with how people and systems respond to change.

Johnson’s questions are more narrowly focused on how communities respond to change. Just as some scientists look at the resilience of ecosystems or individual species, a growing number of researchers are studying the resilience of communities. They’re looking at environmental conditions that affect places — how sea level rise is likely to affect coastal Florida, for example, or how rising temperatures will spark more wildfires in California — but they’re also learning about elements that are not specific to the environment that make a place more likely to bounce back from extreme change.

Katrina Brown, a geography professor at the University of Exeter in England, says community resilience should be thought of not as a trait or a characteristic but as a process that develops among community members.

“It’s something that emerges from a set of activities and interactions,” says Brown, whose research focuses on the environment, global development and the resilience of communities to change. “Rather than thinking that community X has this amount of resilience compared to community Y, actually it’s much more about looking at the social dynamics and the interactions that happen amongst people and how that might be building capacities to deal with different types of change and different types of shocks.”

Brown has studied communities facing climate-related challenges around the world, and she’s found that many prioritize building physical infrastructures like seawalls to prevent or recover from change. But in areas where threats recur, she argues, communities should also focus on building support networks and response plans so they can meet residents’ needs when disaster strikes.

“If you don’t have the capacity to organize, the capacity to plan ahead and the capacity to bring people together and communicate and learn, then actually the physical infrastructure is only going to take you so far,” she says.

This mirrors what architect Doug Pierce — who helped develop RELi, a rating system and set of standards for building resilience in infrastructure and communities — told Knuth.

“Even if you have a building, neighborhood or infrastructure that can weather some kind of extreme event, if you don’t have cohesiveness within the population that is part of that, it’s hard for them to respond to the event while it’s happening,” he said. “And they can’t rebuild afterward if they are not cohesive.”

Brown has seen that a community’s strengths in dealing with one kind of problem also tend to make it better at dealing with others. For example, flood-prone communities she’s studied in coastal England often develop elevated levels of social cohesion after floods that then enable them to collaborate in the face of other challenges, such as the economic blow of a local factory closing.

Katrina Brown, whose research focuses on resilience, says communities she’s worked with in Kenya “were taking a much more general view of what they needed to build capacity within their communities — not just for extreme weather events, but for a whole range of risks they were exposed to.” Here, a theatre event is being used to explore community resilience in villages on the South coast of Kenya. Photo courtesy of Alex Huke

That kind of resilience isn’t just about preparing for or recovering from disaster, though. In poor and flood-prone villages in Kenya, Brown says, she heard from many people that the resilience of their communities hinged on much more fundamental concerns.

“What people said was, “’We can’t actually build resilience in these communities if we aren’t educating our girls, because that means we’re only building the capacity of half of our community.’ So in a way they were taking a much more general view of what they needed to build capacity within their communities — not just for extreme weather events, but for a whole range of risks they were exposed to.”

Social Justice and Shared Responsibility

“There’s a huge social justice consideration and dimension to this work,” says Steve Adams, director of urban resilience at the Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities. Adams’ organization works with communities primarily in North America and Asia to develop policies and programs that address a wide range of climate-related risks. Increasingly, Adams says, the work has shifted from getting city governments to think about resilience to working with community-based organizations and nonprofits to improve their ability to address climate concerns, particularly in disadvantaged communities.

Recent work with Maricopa County in Arizona has centered around organizations that offer low-income families financial assistance to help pay power bills during increasingly common extreme heat events. Adams says his organization helped create maps of utility service calls and power shut-offs during extreme heat to see how different communities were affected. Knowing where people were more likely to need assistance helped nonprofits better allocate resources, which Adams says has helped cut down on heat-related emergencies. The process helped “to surface how climate impacts rebound into a growing demand for social services, which is a cost that most local governments seek to contain, rather than seeing it as a pathway through which they can build community resilience,” he says.

Building community resilience also requires shared responsibility, says Elizabeth Cook, a postdoctoral fellow at the Urban Systems Lab, a research group at The New School in New York focused on the social, ecological and technical systems within cities. Cook is conducting a five-year study of nine cities in the U.S. and Mexico that are developing long-term sustainability and resilience plans. The challenges vary in these cities — ranging from Syracuse, New York, to Hermosillo, Mexico — but Cook says a common element in these cities’ planning efforts has been to put more power in the hands of neighborhood organizations that can respond to local crises.

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“There’s a lot of discussion around developing a more participatory governance system … essentially creating more opportunities for local communities to really actively engage in how decisions are made in cities,” Cook says. By decentralizing climate change planning, cities can let neighborhoods prepare for the threats that are most relevant to them. “I think that’s part of helping to build this connected network and this connected trust within the community,” she says.

In Portland, Oregon, neighborhoods themselves are seen as instrumental to creating a resilient community. In its environmental and sustainability planning, Portland has prioritized policies that ensure resilience at a neighborhood level, particularly by focusing on the city’s urban form. The ideal is the creation of so-called complete neighborhoods that “improve community resiliency to natural hazards by providing access to local services, offering multiple ways to get around, and fostering community connections.” In its latest comprehensive plan, the city has set a goal of making it possible for 80% of Portlanders to live in complete neighborhoods by 2035.

Such tools for developing resilience in communities, though, can only go so far. Sometimes, Brown says, tough decisions have to be made when a place simply can’t become resilient to the extreme changes it faces. She says communities need to prepare for those types of decisions as they consider the implications of climate change.

“It’s about thinking, ‘When do we need fundamental system change?’ And that fundamental system change might mean relocation of communities or structures, it might mean a change in your source of livelihood, and I think that that is part of the whole resilience issue,” she says.

A More Resilient Place?

After working and living in New Mexico for two years, Johnson moved back to Minnesota. He ended up in Duluth, a city that Jesse Keenan, a lecturer in architecture at Harvard whose research focuses on urban development and climate adaptation, recently declared an exceptional site for “climigration,” or climate migration. For Johnson, the pull back to Minnesota was more personal than environmental, but the resilience of the Southwest had been a concern during his time there. In Minnesota, he sees resilience in a variety of ways — from strong community interactions, to knowing that his food is coming from within a short radius, to having confidence that the farms providing that food are less likely to be struck down by catastrophic drought. All these issues were far more of a concern in Santa Fe.

“My partner and I occasionally like to talk about other places where we could imagine ourselves living,” Johnson says. “Santa Fe is still one of those places, but thinking about 30 years out and the changes that might occur … Santa Fe’s lower on the list.”

Johnson recognizes that the Great Lakes states have their own climate challenges, such as heavy precipitation and flooding, but compared with other places, they seem more likely to be resilient in the event of extreme changes on a variety of fronts. For example, all that freshwater can’t hurt.

“When I wake up and get to commute to work and look out over the largest body of freshwater by surface area in the world, which is Lake Superior, that’s kind of a comforting thing to see and to know is there,” he says.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/community-resilience-north-america/feed/0Nate BergReusing wastewater in agriculture could reduce water scarcity. Can you stomach it?https://ensia.com/notable/reuse-recycling-wastewater-in-agriculture/
https://ensia.com/notable/reuse-recycling-wastewater-in-agriculture/#commentsWed, 17 Jul 2019 15:24:03 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26390What happens to water after washing your hands or flushing the toilet? Worldwide, over 80% of wastewater is released untreated into the environment. Cleaning that water and recycling it for use in agriculture could cut down on pollution of lakes and streams and slow the rate at which food production depletes freshwater. And, the nutrients in partially treated wastewater can nourish plants, diminishing the need for fertilizers. A new paper in Agricultural Water Management by researchers at the University of Alicante in Spain analyzed 125 studies for themes related to the acceptance and use of recycled wastewater for irrigation in agriculture. It found that while the public is concerned about health risks, farmers also consider the long-term effects of the wastewater on the quality and health of their soil, which can vary. And beyond practical considerations of risks and benefits, recycling wastewater has an inherent “yuck factor” to be overcome. The Yuck Factor Eating a green bed of lettuce grown with recycled wastewater might trigger concern or even disgust — a response known as the “yuck factor.” Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the yuck factor is less of an issue for farmers during times of drought or when the quality of the recycled wastewater is high. Economics can overcome the yuck factor, too. In the Thessaly region of Greece, 57.9% of farmers responded that they would pay for reclaimed water if it cost half the price of freshwater. Only 8.4% would pay for recycled water if it cost only a little less than freshwater. Consumers, on the other hand, appear more likely to accept the use of wastewater to irrigate crops if they trust the institutions managing the water and if they understand the treatment process, environmental benefits and issues of water scarcity. One strategy to build trust in wastewater treatment, the researchers say, is to build and run small-scale demonstrations before implementing full-scale water reuse programs so the public can see the quality of the water themselves. Because seeing is believing. Risks and Benefits Recycled water is treated to different extents depending on its future use. For example, recycled… Read More

What happens to water after washing your hands or flushing the toilet? Worldwide, over 80% of wastewater is released untreated into the environment. Cleaning that water and recycling it for use in agriculture could cut down on pollution of lakes and streams and slow the rate at which food production depletes freshwater. And, the nutrients in partially treated wastewater can nourish plants, diminishing the need for fertilizers.

A new paper in Agricultural Water Management by researchers at the University of Alicante in Spain analyzed 125 studies for themes related to the acceptance and use of recycled wastewater for irrigation in agriculture. It found that while the public is concerned about health risks, farmers also consider the long-term effects of the wastewater on the quality and health of their soil, which can vary. And beyond practical considerations of risks and benefits, recycling wastewater has an inherent “yuck factor” to be overcome.

The Yuck Factor

Eating a green bed of lettuce grown with recycled wastewater might trigger concern or even disgust — a response known as the “yuck factor.”

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the yuck factor is less of an issue for farmers during times of drought or when the quality of the recycled wastewater is high. Economics can overcome the yuck factor, too. In the Thessaly region of Greece, 57.9% of farmers responded that they would pay for reclaimed water if it cost half the price of freshwater. Only 8.4% would pay for recycled water if it cost only a little less than freshwater.

Consumers, on the other hand, appear more likely to accept the use of wastewater to irrigate crops if they trust the institutions managing the water and if they understand the treatment process, environmental benefits and issues of water scarcity. One strategy to build trust in wastewater treatment, the researchers say, is to build and run small-scale demonstrations before implementing full-scale water reuse programs so the public can see the quality of the water themselves. Because seeing is believing.

Risks and Benefits

Recycled water is treated to different extents depending on its future use. For example, recycled water entering the drinking water supply is treated more than recycled water used for irrigation.

But other compounds in the water are actually nutritious for soils, replacing or diminishing the need for fertilizers. One study highlighted by the researchers found that in Hyderabad, India, farmers believed the partially treated wastewater contained nutrients that were beneficial to their crops. However, growers also changed which crops they grew because of increasing soil salinity.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations issued recommendations for safe reuse of water in 1973 and 1987, respectively. Those guidelines, along with others from the European Union, the United States, and elsewhere, have informed development of wastewater reuse regulations around the world. But some cities and countries have limited ability to reliably uphold water treatment regulations.

Moving forward, “the main challenge in using wastewater for irrigation is to shift from informal, unplanned uses of untreated or partially treated wastewater to planned safe uses,” according to a 2017 United Nations report. As this paper points out, education is an important part of that picture.

“As citizens become more familiar with the technology and general understanding of the associated benefits of increasing water reuse,” it concludes, “officials, planners and managers may come up against less opposition to additional applications and achieve greater water savings through the widespread implementation of water reuse programs” — a move that could prove crucial to meeting the needs of an increasingly thirsty world.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/reuse-recycling-wastewater-in-agriculture/feed/2Becky MackelprangAre bioplastics better for the environment than conventional plastics?https://ensia.com/features/bioplastics-bio-based-biodegradable-environment/
https://ensia.com/features/bioplastics-bio-based-biodegradable-environment/#commentsTue, 16 Jul 2019 14:47:55 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26338Have you ever stood in front of a supermarket shelf and wondered if you should buy that product made from bioplastics rather than the conventional kind? Many people assume all bioplastics are made from plants and can break down completely in the environment. But that’s not the case. The term “bioplastics” is actually used for two separate things: bio-based plastics (plastics made at least partly from biological matter) and biodegradable plastics (plastics that can be completely broken down by microbes in a reasonable timeframe, given specific conditions). Not all bio-based plastics are biodegradable, and not all biodegradable plastics are bio-based. And even biodegradable plastics might not biodegrade in every environment. Sounds confusing? It certainly is. Subscribe to feed “There are a lot of bioplastics or materials that are called bioplastics that are not biodegradable,” says Constance Ißbrücker, head of environmental affairs at the industry association European Bioplastics. Subscribe to feed For some plastics, the same polymer chains can be made from renewable sources. The resulting bioplastics are chemically identical to their fossil counterparts. PET, for example — short for polyethylene terephthalate, which is the stuff most bottles are made of — can be synthesized from fossil fuel products or plants like sugarcane. The resulting material is the exact same. Such non-biodegradable bioplastics behave in the environment just like conventional plastic and persist for an unknown but long amount of time. Not only that, but none of the standards for plastics labeled as biodegradable or compostable today makes them suitable for disposal in the open environment. Given that, can bioplastics play a role in tackling environmental problems? Or are they merely greenwashing? The most accurate answer is, it depends. PLA: Conditionally Compostable Take polylactic acid (PLA), for example. This bioplastic is used to make shopping bags, transparent cups, 3-D printing material and other products. Because it can be derived from plant material like corn sugar, potato or sugarcane, it can reduce the demand for fossil fuels used to make conventional plastics. PLA is recyclable, biodegradable and compostable. But that doesn’t mean the ocean — or any other natural environment — can… Read More

Have you ever stood in front of a supermarket shelf and wondered if you should buy that product made from bioplastics rather than the conventional kind? Many people assume all bioplastics are made from plants and can break down completely in the environment. But that’s not the case.

The term “bioplastics” is actually used for two separate things: bio-based plastics (plastics made at least partly from biological matter) and biodegradable plastics (plastics that can be completely broken down by microbes in a reasonable timeframe, given specific conditions). Not all bio-based plastics are biodegradable, and not all biodegradable plastics are bio-based. And even biodegradable plastics might not biodegrade in every environment. Sounds confusing? It certainly is.

“There are a lot of bioplastics or materials that are called bioplastics that are not biodegradable,” says Constance Ißbrücker, head of environmental affairs at the industry association European Bioplastics.

For some plastics, the same polymer chains can be made from renewable sources. The resulting bioplastics are chemically identical to their fossil counterparts. PET, for example — short for polyethylene terephthalate, which is the stuff most bottles are made of — can be synthesized from fossil fuel products or plants like sugarcane. The resulting material is the exact same. Such non-biodegradable bioplastics behave in the environment just like conventional plastic and persist for an unknown but long amount of time.

Not only that, but none of the standards for plastics labeled as biodegradable or compostable today makes them suitable for disposal in the open environment. Given that, can bioplastics play a role in tackling environmental problems? Or are they merely greenwashing? The most accurate answer is, it depends.

PLA: Conditionally Compostable

Take polylactic acid (PLA), for example. This bioplastic is used to make shopping bags, transparent cups, 3-D printing material and other products. Because it can be derived from plant material like corn sugar, potato or sugarcane, it can reduce the demand for fossil fuels used to make conventional plastics.

PLA is recyclable, biodegradable and compostable. But that doesn’t mean the ocean — or any other natural environment — can easily handle it.

To Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP), drinking straws made from PLA are “the perfect example for greenwashing.” They are more expensive than other plastic drinking straws, but don’t readily biodegrade on a beach or in the sea.

Graphic courtesy of European Bioplastics, Nova-Institute (2018). Click to enlarge.

“You put it on the package [that it] is biodegradable, but at the point where these materials are . . . fear[ed] to end up, they will not biodegrade,” Wurm says.

For biodegradation, PLA needs industrial composting conditions, including temperatures above 58 °C (136 °F). It needs to be properly managed and routed to specialized industrial composting or recycling facilities. Under the right circumstances, microbes can turn the material into carbon dioxide and water within a couple of weeks. However, if it becomes littered or dumped, PLA sticks around for much longer. When pure PLA ends up in seawater, it does not seem to biodegrade at all.

PHA: It’s Complicated

Other kinds of bioplastics are known to better biodegrade in marine environments. However, whether that really happens in a specific case, and how long it will take, is highly unpredictable.

Marine biologist Christian Lott and his colleagues at HYDRA, a private research institute with a research station on the Italian island of Elba, have field-tested different biopolymers in a range of aquatic environments from tropical beaches to the Mediterranean seafloor. They found that materials that had been shown to biodegrade in seawater in lab testing also do so in the environmental conditions they tested.

Among the materials tested at HYDRA are bioplastics called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). Produced by microbes, PHAs currently comprise a tiny slice of the market. However, demand is expected to grow strongly in the next few years.

A thin film of PHA will degrade in a tropical environment on the seafloor in one to two months, Lott says. But in the Mediterranean, it can take 10 times as long. “And imagine, in the Arctic, in the ice or at ice-cold water, or in the deep sea where we have 0 to 4 degrees, hardly any nutrients around, bacteria will have a hard time to digest these materials,” he says.

This is the caveat to PHAs, says Linda Amaral-Zettler, a marine microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). “While they can biodegrade in the marine environment, we still need to appreciate that part of the marine environment is not compatible with biodegradation.”

In some regions of the ocean biodegradation is so slow that even organic material like fish or algae can leave their traces in the fossil record.

Even with the best waste management systems, it’s realistic to assume some plastic will always escape. Think of the abrasion from car or bike tires, from ship paints, sneakers, or synthetic garments. If bits of plastics are small enough to travel through the air, they will be hard to ever contain.

So could we design a plastic that breaks down pretty much anywhere?

Wurm says it would theoretically be possible to build molecular triggers into materials so that they know when to biodegrade. “It sounds fancy, and it is fancy and it’s expensive,” he says. But even if the funding were there, finding and including molecular triggers for each and every material in each and every environment seems to be a nearly impossible task.

A material that has a full functionality but biodegrades immediately at its end of life, is “not going to happen. Never,” Lott says.

Different Chemicals, Different Problems

Moreover, when considering the impacts of plastic products on humans and the environment, looking at just the plastic itself is never enough. A single plastic product can contain dozens of chemicals, some of which might have adverse effects on us humans or other organisms if they are released into the environment and taken up.

Lisa Zimmerman, a Ph.D. student in the Department Aquatic Ecotoxicology at Goethe University in Frankfurt (Main), Germany, has conducted research that suggests that chemical mixtures present in biodegradable or bio-based plastic products can influence the metabolic activity of the bioluminescent bacterium Aliivibrio fischeri. In a number of additional experiments she found that these chemical mixtures can have the potential to cause oxidative stress or influence the hormonal system in living organisms.

“What I can tell from my research is that bioplastics are not necessarily safer than conventional plastics with regard to the toxicity of the chemical mixtures they include,” Zimmermann says.

Land Use Issues

Bio-based plastics have other environmental implications as well. One big criticism has been the land needed to grow the plants.

On the basis of a report from the Institute for Bioplastics and Biocomposites (IfBB) in Hanover, European Bioplastics estimates that bio-based plastics currently use less than 0.02% of agricultural land. “There is no real competition with food and feed production,” Ißbrücker argues.

But Christoph Lauwigi, who represents the working group on waste and resources with Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) worries about the side effects of a growth in the bioplastic market. In the German Plastic Atlas, he explains that an increase in bio-based plastics could raise the pressure on arable land, potentially leading to water shortages, desertification and the loss of habitats and biodiversity. He also notes that the reliance on industrial agriculture for the production of new plastics might increase monoculture cropping and the use of pesticides.

Ißbrücker says the industry is working toward a smaller land use footprint by using waste materials or algae. At this point however, these sources cannot be processed as effectively yet as the current feedstocks, she adds.

Niche Applications

Plastics that are currently marketed as “biodegradable” will themselves contribute to plastic pollution if they are lost or littered. They do not break down as quickly and completely in the environment as the term might imply and can thus harm wildlife and ecosystems. But there are a few applications where using biodegradable plastics may provide a net benefit to the environment.

In some countries, bags that are compostable under industrial conditions are used to collect organic waste. They can offer a cleaner and more convenient way than nondisposable containers for people to collect food scraps for composting.

Enzo Favoino, a waste management expert at the Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza in Italy and chair of the Scientific Committee of Zero Waste Europe, is convinced this is the way to go. Fewer organics in the trash means less fermentation, allowing waste management operators to come by less often to pick up the trash. This can not only save money but also boost the recycling rates of other materials such as paper, glass, plastic and metal, he says.

Collecting organic waste separately also diverts food scraps from landfills and dumps, where they can produce methane — a powerful greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.

However, not every country has the infrastructure in place to use compostable bags to these ends. In Germany, for example, compostable bags are screened out of the organics by technology that doesn’t distinguish between compostable and conventional plastic.

Biodegradable plastics are currently also marketed as mulching films for agriculture, which farmers can just leave on the fields to plow under. For decades, plastic mulch film has been spread out on fields to support crop growth and save pesticides and water. But with conventional plastics this so-called Plasticulture can cause “white pollution” to accumulate on farmland if it is not removed and discarded.

Is biodegradable film a safe alternative? If they are proven to biodegrade in the soil, they would leave less pollution behind. But wind or animals might carry pieces of broken film into the air, rivers or oceans, to places where they might not be able to biodegrade. There’s also a potential for chemicals to leach from the films to the soil ecosystem, a question that is currently under scrutiny.

Tackling Confusion

There’s no doubt, bioplastics are still plastics. Just because some of them are made from plants or have the potential to biodegrade under limited conditions, they can’t be touted as “planet-safe.” For the ones that claim to biodegrade or compost, the fine print is crucial.

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So check the label: What does it say? Where and how is it supposed to biodegrade? How can you safely dispose of the product? 5 Gyres, a California-based nonprofit working on plastic pollution, has published an overview of labels in its Better Alternatives Now B.A.N. List 2.0. Beware, however: According to Ißbrücker, some uses of labels are fake.

The plastic industry projects strong growth in production, while many environmentalists are calling to reduce use.

Biodegradable plastics won’t solve the plastic crisis, so tackling consumption remains key. “By just reducing the amounts and the types of different packaging that we have in our supermarkets, we can do a lot, without developing novel materials,” says Wurm.

Even European Bioplastics’ Ißbrücker thinks that might very well happen. “Maybe not in 5 or 10 years, but as the problems keep growing, plastic production might go down one day, because it’s just too much.”

Editor’s note: A transcript and more episodes of the Plastisphere podcast are available here. A German version of this article can be found on RiffReporter.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/bioplastics-bio-based-biodegradable-environment/feed/2Anja KriegerOpinion: Why traditional knowledge — not external tech — is the key to truly sustainable agriculturehttps://ensia.com/voices/sustainable-agriculture-traditional-knowledge-indigenous-farmers/
https://ensia.com/voices/sustainable-agriculture-traditional-knowledge-indigenous-farmers/#commentsWed, 10 Jul 2019 14:08:46 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=voices&p=26301The idea that our current agricultural and food system needs adjusting isn’t exactly revolutionary these days. In fact, many scientists and others believe that it could use an entire overhaul. After decades of technological advances focused on grain production and the development of synthetic inputs, there is finally recognition that the benefits — higher crop yields and increased food supply — also come with side effects. These include widespread soil and water contamination, human displacement from the expansion of large-scale monoculture farm operations, health impacts including diabetes, and heavy reliance on fossil fuels, among others. The solution to these problems, as suggested by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, is to transition to sustainable agriculture. Hardly a novel concept, sustainable agriculture is something indigenous groups have been developing and practicing for eons. Yet it wasn’t until the early 20th century, at the advent of industrialized agriculture, that visionaries such as Eve Balfour and Lord Northbourne began to popularize the term through their work confirming the importance of diversity, ecological knowledge and a strong human/nature connection, as well as the value of small-scale family farming, which, despite the popular misconception that industrial systems are necessary to feed growing populations, continues to produce most of our food with fewer resources and less harmful impacts than the industrial model. While it’s encouraging to see the latest wave of interest to transform the way we farm and eat — thanks in part to growing awareness of climate change (agriculture currently produces roughly 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, rising to as high as 29% taking into account the entire food system) — the increasingly simplified version of sustainable agriculture currently being sold to the public and to farmers is concerning. Specifically, we fear the growing trend of “input substitution” — that is, the mere swapping of chemical products, usually fertilizers and pesticides, for those that are organic and therefore considered less harmful and more “sustainable.” Don’t get us wrong: We support action that motivates farmers and consumers to make the switch from conventional to organic. Still, it is high time to distinguish what… Read More

The idea that our current agricultural and food system needs adjusting isn’t exactly revolutionary these days. In fact, many scientists and others believe that it could use an entire overhaul. After decades of technological advances focused on grain production and the development of synthetic inputs, there is finally recognition that the benefits — higher crop yields and increased food supply — also come with side effects. These include widespread soil and water contamination, human displacement from the expansion of large-scale monoculture farm operations, health impacts including diabetes, and heavy reliance on fossil fuels, among others.

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While it’s encouraging to see the latest wave of interest to transform the way we farm and eat — thanks in part to growing awareness of climate change (agriculture currently produces roughly 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, rising to as high as 29% taking into account the entire food system) — the increasingly simplified version of sustainable agriculture currently being sold to the public and to farmers is concerning. Specifically, we fear the growing trend of “input substitution” — that is, the mere swapping of chemical products, usually fertilizers and pesticides, for those that are organic and therefore considered less harmful and more “sustainable.”

Don’t get us wrong: We support action that motivates farmers and consumers to make the switch from conventional to organic. Still, it is high time to distinguish what is truly sustainable from what is just another spin on the one-size-fits-all, technology-focused solutions that got us into this mess in the first place.

As a means to improve food security, as well as tackle other issues related to cultural and environmental restoration, many residents have turned (or returned) to agroecology — a set of ancestral and sustainable practices and principles that include the use of heritage crops; seed saving; soil conservation measures, such as reduced or no tillage; and the production of composts from local organic material. The theory is that through crop diversification, redesign and the ecological use of local resources, families will become more resilient and less dependent on external inputs and aid while simultaneously protecting the environment.

Don Cristobal, a farmer and community leader in Pacux, Guatemala, stands in a diversified parcel with trees and traditional milpa, an ancient polyculture system of corn, beans and squash, along with a host of other native edible plants. Photo courtesy of Nathan Einbinder

Despite continued skepticism about the potential of agroecology as a viable alternative to the industrial model — particularly by the corporations that are bound to lose if it is taken to scale — a growing body of research shows that it works.

While local interest in agroecology is notably high (the corn-beans-squash milpa system, developed in the region thousands of years ago and still used today, is considered one of the world’s finest examples of agroecological production) community associations that promote it struggle to compete against national and international programs that gift agrochemicals and hybrid seeds, which, despite bumper harvests in the first year, cannot be re-collected due to their sterility or patents, and are reported to us by local farmers as intolerant to drought. The logic behind these programs, aside from supporting a multibillion-dollar industry that relies on new customers, is to provide a quick fix to problems related to lack of soil nutrients, as well as to cut labor costs and reduce physical work in general.

Simplified “Organic” Alternatives

While substitution of organic “bio-inputs” minimizes — at least as far as we know —environmental harms associated with synthetic agrochemicals, externally produced organic bio-inputs promise once again quick and easy results, with many of the same consequences.

Native corn varieties such as those shown here are adaptable to drought and come from seeds that were passed down from this farmer’s parents and grandparents in Pacux, Guatemala. Photo courtesy of Nathan Einbinder

In one noted program, a Guatemalan company has teamed up with USAID to manufacture bio-stimulants, fertilizers composed of microorganisms that improve soil quality. As with previous programs, these inputs are gifted to farmers, and the goal, according to the company, is to turn the country into a so-called “biotechnology hub,” while simultaneously encouraging family producers to shift away from using petroleum-based inputs such as synthetic pesticides and fertilizers — especially in the production of export crops, where overuse has cost companies millions of dollars due to unacceptable residue levels found by importers.

Truly Sustainable Agricultural Systems

As we previously mentioned, we’re in favor of strategies that reduce farmers’ dependence on synthetic agrochemicals as well as those that promote healthy microbial interactions in the soil — two interconnected elements, among many, that constitute sustainable farming.

So, what makes these inputs so incompatible with truly sustainable agricultural systems?

To begin, as suggested by sustainability expert Jules Pretty, the foundation of any sustainable agricultural system is effective and ingenious use of local resources by local (small-scale family) farmers. For this to occur you need strong social capital, intimate knowledge of local ecology and continuous innovation.

Sustainable agriculture relies on the use of local resources by local, small-scale family farmers. Here, a group of small-scale farmers teach sustainable low-impact and indigenous methods to other indigenous farmers in Guatemala. Photo courtesy of Nathan Einbinder

The problems with introducing “bio-inputs” into the communities are displacement of local practices and the risk of creating new forms of dependence. Just as the introduction of agrochemicals (and the miracle solutions it promised) disrupted local agroecological processes 40 years ago, the organic equivalents continue this cycle, displacing local knowledge of how to maintain soil fertility through careful management of organic material; how to avoid pest outbreaks through intercropping and knowledge of soil types and microclimate; and how to use other interrelated practices that, among the families we work with, involve a deep connection to the land and its stewardship.

If sustainability is the true objective, we need to focus, not on new technological fixes, but on the recovery of local, time-tested agroecological practices. We need to empower those who hold traditional knowledge, support local groups, and introduce new techniques only when easily appropriable and harmonious within surrounding nature and customs.

Only when this happens will we see a shift from the problems that come when external actors, actions and products disrupt farmers’ traditional ways of land stewardship. Only when we once again start valuing agriculture as a system that is part of a larger social system, with all the history and tradition that comes with it, will we see a shift to truly sustainable agriculture.

Editor’s note: The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Ensia. We present ​them to further discussion around important topics. ​We encourage you to respond with a comment below following our commenting guidelines, which can be found on this page. ​In addition, you might consider​ ​submitting a Voices piece of your own. See Ensia’s Contact page for submission guidelines.

]]>https://ensia.com/voices/sustainable-agriculture-traditional-knowledge-indigenous-farmers/feed/1Nathan EinbinderTiny creatures play a big role in climate changehttps://ensia.com/notable/tiny-creatures-play-a-big-role-in-climate-change/
https://ensia.com/notable/tiny-creatures-play-a-big-role-in-climate-change/#respondTue, 09 Jul 2019 21:03:42 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26281You can’t see them, but it’s time to start trying. Microorganisms, tiny creatures invisible to the naked eye, play a “central role” in our climate crisis, more than 30 microbiologists contend in a new report in Nature Reviews Microbiology. “The microbial world constitutes the life support system of the biosphere,” the researchers write in what they call a “scientists’ warning to humanity.” Despite living everywhere that larger organisms inhabit, and in many extreme environments in which they don’t, bacteria and other microbes are “rarely the focus” of climate change research, the scientists say. To adequately address the climate challenge, they say, that needs to change. Take the greenhouse gas methane, whose molecules heat the planet by 86 times as much as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. A key source of methane emissions is agriculture — or, more precisely, microorganisms that live in agricultural systems. The microbiologists’ warning notes that while rice helps feed half of all people on Earth, the microbes that live in rice paddies produce one-fifth of agricultural methane — hundreds of millions of tons of the gas. Meanwhile, the researchers point out, the No. 1 way humans spurt methane into the air is by raising ruminant livestock, animals like sheep and cattle, who carry methane-producing microbes in their guts. These tiny bacteria, protozoa and fungi help break down food, a process that releases methane on the other end. That’s why the climate footprint of ruminant meat production is 19 to 48 times higher than some plant-based protein. The amount of methane in the atmosphere has been climbing, especially since 2014. While researchers haven’t reached a consensus on exactly what’s driving the recent spike, it likely involves both fossil fuels and microbial methane-makers in wetlands and farmland. In the oceans, the report says, warming waters may change the communities of microorganisms that live in corals, which could in turn boost the risk of coral bleaching and disease. And as oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air, they become more acidic, which might be damaging the tissue of fish and other organisms, weakening their immune systems and opening… Read More

Microorganisms, tiny creatures invisible to the naked eye, play a “central role” in our climate crisis, more than 30 microbiologists contend in a new report in Nature Reviews Microbiology. “The microbial world constitutes the life support system of the biosphere,” the researchers write in what they call a “scientists’ warning to humanity.”

Despite living everywhere that larger organisms inhabit, and in many extreme environments in which they don’t, bacteria and other microbes are “rarely the focus” of climate change research, the scientists say. To adequately address the climate challenge, they say, that needs to change.

Take the greenhouse gas methane, whose molecules heat the planet by 86 times as much as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. A key source of methane emissions is agriculture — or, more precisely, microorganisms that live in agricultural systems. The microbiologists’ warning notes that while rice helps feed half of all people on Earth, the microbes that live in rice paddies produce one-fifth of agricultural methane — hundreds of millions of tons of the gas.

Meanwhile, the researchers point out, the No. 1 way humans spurt methane into the air is by raising ruminant livestock, animals like sheep and cattle, who carry methane-producing microbes in their guts. These tiny bacteria, protozoa and fungi help break down food, a process that releases methane on the other end. That’s why the climate footprint of ruminant meat production is 19 to 48 times higher than some plant-based protein.

In the oceans, the report says, warming waters may change the communities of microorganisms that live in corals, which could in turn boost the risk of coral bleaching and disease. And as oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air, they become more acidic, which might be damaging the tissue of fish and other organisms, weakening their immune systems and opening an opportunity for bacterial infection.

Small marine algae known as phytoplankton coat the oceans, and they suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Half of photosynthesis worldwide is the work of these plankton, which churn through their life cycles far faster than trees and other plants. That speed, the study notes, makes them “respond rapidly on a global scale to climate variations.”

On land, melting permafrost serves up a meal of formerly frozen carbon to microbes that decompose it, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the air above.

The researchers urge more research investigating the role of microorganisms in climate change, and call for climate models to include microbial processes in order to improve predictions of future climate scenarios.

In addition, the scientists recommend that policy-makers and natural resource managers factor microorganisms into their decisions and actions such as efforts to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. That may seem like a big emphasis on such tiny creatures — but if these researchers are right, it will be to everyone’s benefit to size up the small stuff.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/tiny-creatures-play-a-big-role-in-climate-change/feed/0Andrew UrevigCan saving jaguars sustain local economies?https://ensia.com/features/jaguars-restoration-economy-conservation-for-profit/
https://ensia.com/features/jaguars-restoration-economy-conservation-for-profit/#respondWed, 03 Jul 2019 21:10:38 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26254Editor’s note: This story was originally published by The Revelator. Biologist Ron Pulliam is used to being at the center of America’s most pressing wildlife and public lands issues. He led the National Biological Survey (now part of the U.S. Geological Survey) and served as science advisor for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt under President Bill Clinton. But despite his high-powered positions, he says, “I never felt like I was making a difference.” Retired now, Pulliam is still trying to make a difference — this time in the Sky Islands of southern Arizona rather than the halls of Washington, D.C. As controversy mounts over President Trump’s border wall, Pulliam finds himself knee deep in saving one of the Southwest’s most iconic species: the endangered jaguar. But he’s not doing it through traditional conservation measures. Instead he’s launched a for-profit company that’s working to prove that saving jaguars and other wildlife has economic benefits for the community. On the Move Many Americans think of jaguars (Panthera onca) as the big cats of Latin America, slinking through Amazonian jungles or climbing Guatemala’s Mayan ruins. Yet jaguar populations are scattered throughout Mexico — some not far from the U.S. border — and the species once ranged from California through Texas. They essentially disappeared from the United States in the 20th century as ranching, cities and suburbs took over the scrub oak and mesquite landscape of the Southwest. Less habitat meant less wild prey, so jaguars had more incentive to attack livestock, giving ranchers more incentive to shoot jaguars on sight. But a renaissance of sorts has emerged over the past two decades: Since 1996, at least seven jaguars have been spotted in southern Arizona and New Mexico, almost certainly moving north from populations in Mexico. The species that the late carnivore expert Alan Rabinowitz once called “the indomitable beast” is now trying to recover its lost American ground. But politics could thwart that advance. A solid wall along the entire border with Mexico would stop jaguars from moving north, halting their already tenuous return. Howard Quigley, jaguar program director for the global wild cat conservation… Read More

Biologist Ron Pulliam is used to being at the center of America’s most pressing wildlife and public lands issues. He led the National Biological Survey (now part of the U.S. Geological Survey) and served as science advisor for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt under President Bill Clinton. But despite his high-powered positions, he says, “I never felt like I was making a difference.”

Retired now, Pulliam is still trying to make a difference — this time in the Sky Islands of southern Arizona rather than the halls of Washington, D.C. As controversy mounts over President Trump’s border wall, Pulliam finds himself knee deep in saving one of the Southwest’s most iconic species: the endangered jaguar.

But he’s not doing it through traditional conservation measures. Instead he’s launched a for-profit company that’s working to prove that saving jaguars and other wildlife has economic benefits for the community.

On the Move

Many Americans think of jaguars (Panthera onca) as the big cats of Latin America, slinking through Amazonian jungles or climbing Guatemala’s Mayan ruins. Yet jaguar populations are scattered throughout Mexico — some not far from the U.S. border — and the species once ranged from California through Texas. They essentially disappeared from the United States in the 20th century as ranching, cities and suburbs took over the scrub oak and mesquite landscape of the Southwest.

Less habitat meant less wild prey, so jaguars had more incentive to attack livestock, giving ranchers more incentive to shoot jaguars on sight.

But a renaissance of sorts has emerged over the past two decades: Since 1996, at least seven jaguars have been spotted in southern Arizona and New Mexico, almost certainly moving north from populations in Mexico. The species that the late carnivore expert Alan Rabinowitz once called “the indomitable beast” is now trying to recover its lost American ground.

But politics could thwart that advance. A solid wall along the entire border with Mexico would stop jaguars from moving north, halting their already tenuous return. Howard Quigley, jaguar program director for the global wild cat conservation group Panthera and one of the lead authors of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Jaguar Recovery Plan, says Mexican populations are critical to the recovery of jaguars in the U.S. “If there will ever be a population in the States, it will require animals moving up from the south,” he says.

Scientists identified land between disconnected parts of the Arizona’s Coronado National Forest as important for jaguars moving north from Mexico. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service

Yet even if the border remains open, other modern-day obstacles such as roads, houses, cities and ranches threaten the big cats’ survival. Jaguars need good cover, lots of prey and vast wild landscapes. They typically shy away from people, meaning that the crowded 21st century offers few routes north leading them to safe habitat. And by nature female jaguars are less likely to venture the trek. Most jaguars disappear a few years after arriving in the States without establishing a population.

A Restoration Economy

Pulliam hopes to change that by preserving the most important route for recolonizing jaguars in Arizona.

He didn’t set out to protect jaguars specifically when he retired to the region in 2009. Rather, he wanted to explore new approaches to conservation that would protect large landscapes while simultaneously supporting local economies.

“From the beginning I took the attitude that we can restore an area, but in the long run this is all for naught unless local people buy into it,” he says. He held a series of workshops with local conservationists, government agencies and others, and developed criteria for choosing worthwhile projects that fit his vision of a “restoration economy,” a model that would benefit both local people and ecologies.

Jaguars, it turned out, would be the ideal conservation investment.

Based on his criteria, the location for a restoration economy conservation project first has to be valuable from a scientific standpoint. A 2008 study by scientists at Northern Arizona University identified a corridor of private land between two disconnected sections of the Coronado National Forest near the town of Patagonia, Arizona, as the most important habitat link for jaguars moving north from Mexico into Arizona.

Next, the site must face an imminent threat. The jaguar corridor did: A developer had proposed a housing development on the private land bisecting the national forest. The planned 189 housing lots on more than 1,300 acres (526 hectares) of land fell within a 2-mile (3-kilometer) gap linking prime habitat in the Patagonia Mountains to that in the Santa Rita Mountains — the exact corridor jaguars would use to move upstate.

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Finally, the solution has to be economically feasible. One obvious way to make money is through tourism. Patagonia is already a birding mecca, and hiking, biking and equestrian trails run throughout the property that would have become the housing development. Pulliam is working to link these trails to the nearby 800-mile-long (1288-kilometer-long) Arizona Trail that connects the Mexican border with Utah, making the town a hiking destination as well.

Another long-distance trail — the Juan Bautista de Anza Trail, running from Hermosillo, Mexico, through Nogales, Arizona, all the way to San Francisco, California — lies about 20 miles (32 kilometers) away. Connecting the corridor trail network with these longer trails could increase its tourism appeal.

But the restoration economy goes far beyond that. Instead of asking a nonprofit land trust to purchase the property, Pulliam created a for-profit company called Wildlife Corridors LLC to accomplish that task. The corporation, in turn, offers investors the possibility of a profit — a high-risk, low-return venture, but enough for do-gooders with a few dollars to sign up.

Overcoming Challenges

However, realizing both a profit and a conservation goal has been a challenge.

The housing developers filed for bankruptcy after reportedly sinking millions into roads and connecting some lots to power and water, according to Pulliam. And so the Wildlife Corridors crew negotiated with the developers’ bank for more than a year to acquire the land for the bargain price of little more than US$1 million in 2014. That included more than 1,200 acres (486 hectares) with 173 lots (the developers already had sold 16 lots), of which 149 lay within the essential jaguar corridor.

“Six or eight [investors] pooled funds,” Pulliam says, including himself. “We raised $400,000 in equity and then bought the property with a big mortgage.”

Then they hatched a plan to generate funds to pay off the mortgage and support their conservation efforts through three income streams.

The first stream involved philanthropy. Wildlife Corridors LLC partnered with the nonprofit Biophilia Foundation, which could accept tax-deductible donations to purchase the development rights on the lots from the company and then retire the rights.

The second stream comes from selling 24 lots on the southern edge of the property, where roads and power infrastructure had already been built.

The third comes from federal grants to restore habitat on the property. So far, this has included removing invasive species, halting erosion and planting thousands of agave plants to protect the endangered lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae yerbabuena).

“The only reason we have succeeded is because we have all three revenue streams,” Pulliam says. Still, they had to weather a rough first few years, including battling a developer lawsuit that halted their income and incurred more legal expenses.

So far Wildlife Corridors LLC has retired 840 acres (340 hectares) of development rights, sold 11 lots and reduced its debt to less than US$300,000, according to Pulliam. Investors haven’t yet received any dividends, but several have swapped their investments for lots, which could appreciate in value. Pulliam remains optimistic that real profits eventually will emerge.

Wildlife Corridors is just one part of a larger effort to stimulate a restoration economy. The company works closely with nonprofit and limited-profit organizations that Pulliam and collaborators created to bring in additional revenue by restoring habitat. For example Borderlands Restoration L3C is a limited-profit corporation that sells native and pollinator plants to federal agencies for regional restoration projects. Collectively, according to Pulliam, this Borderlands Restoration Network boasts a US$3 million budget and employs about 20 local people — jobs that Pulliam claims are better than those offered by the mining industry because they are sustainable and will last long into the future.

“We’re tiny now,” he says, “but we’re growing.”

Pulliam believes this combination of diverse revenue streams, local jobs and engagement is critical for success in any restoration economy venture. In Patagonia people are using the land and “putting their own blood, sweat and tears into it,” he says. The mistakes of past conservation efforts, in his view, occurred when national conservation groups bought land and sealed it off, triggering local resentment.

“We won’t consider ourselves successful until we can offer as much to the local economy as mining and local extraction,” says Pulliam.

He’s got a ways to go on that front. Although the recently approved Rosemont Copper Mine 25 miles (40 kilometers) north doesn’t directly affect this restoration project, it will, if constructed, offer jobs while likely impeding jaguar movement. And of course, President Trump’s proposed border wall remains a threat.

The full economic potential will take time to emerge and so will the conservation value of the project. Camera traps on the protected property have recorded numerous mammal species, but no jaguars, although at least one jaguar has been seen in the region this year in Arizona. Two others have crossed the border in the past few years.

Challenges remain to boosting that number. But for now, with a key U.S. corridor preserved, jaguars have more of a fighting chance.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/jaguars-restoration-economy-conservation-for-profit/feed/0Amy MatthewsHow the secret language of plants can make agriculture more environmentally friendlyhttps://ensia.com/notable/plants-agriculture-vocs-environment-climate/
https://ensia.com/notable/plants-agriculture-vocs-environment-climate/#respondMon, 01 Jul 2019 19:04:43 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26230Freshly cut grass is a quintessential smell of summer. While the smell might conjure memories of lemonade stands and kids playing outside, it also serves another purpose. Plants — not just grass — with leaves damaged by lawn mowers or, more often, plant-eaters out for lunch, release smells that subtly manipulate the behavior of plants and insects around them. The subtle odors plants emit are made up of small molecules called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Neighboring plants can detect some of those VOCs and recognize them as a warning signal that insects or other herbivores are nearby. In response, those plants can produce molecules that make them toxic or unappealing to the herbivore. Moreover, the predators of those herbivores can, in some cases, detect VOCs released by plants. To them, the VOCs are like the dinner bell. Not only that, but VOCs also can inhibit the growth of bacterial and fungal pathogens, stymie weed growth, and help plants cope with stressful conditions like drought. Now, researchers are exploring ways to harness VOCs to trim the need for pesticides in some farming systems while protecting the harvest and bolstering plant production in stressful environments. And they’re learning from the smallholder farmers who, year after year, already take advantage of VOCs. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, they note that more than 120,000 smallholder farmsteads use VOCs to improve crop performance. In southwestern Kenya, some growers plant maize varieties that, upon detection of egg-laying stemborers, emit VOCs that attract stemborer parasitoids. While these maize varieties have lower yield than common commercial varieties, this intrinsic protection from pests make them attractive to many growers, particularly those who cannot afford commercial seeds and pesticides. In another application, sub-Saharan African farmers grow their crops alongside companion plant species with VOCs that either repel plant-eating insects or attract their predators. Some companion plant species can also capture nitrogen, control weeds, help crops tolerate drought, or provide food for livestock. So “Why are VOCs not more intensively used in agriculture for integrated and eco-friendly plant protection?” the researchers ask. Convincing growers to switch to lower-yielding varieties to cut… Read More

Freshly cut grass is a quintessential smell of summer. While the smell might conjure memories of lemonade stands and kids playing outside, it also serves another purpose. Plants — not just grass — with leaves damaged by lawn mowers or, more often, plant-eaters out for lunch, release smells that subtly manipulate the behavior of plants and insects around them.

The subtle odors plants emit are made up of small molecules called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Neighboring plants can detect some of those VOCs and recognize them as a warning signal that insects or other herbivores are nearby. In response, those plants can produce molecules that make them toxic or unappealing to the herbivore. Moreover, the predators of those herbivores can, in some cases, detect VOCs released by plants. To them, the VOCs are like the dinner bell.

Not only that, but VOCs also can inhibit the growth of bacterial and fungal pathogens, stymie weed growth, and help plants cope with stressful conditions like drought.

Now, researchers are exploring ways to harness VOCs to trim the need for pesticides in some farming systems while protecting the harvest and bolstering plant production in stressful environments. And they’re learning from the smallholder farmers who, year after year, already take advantage of VOCs.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, they note that more than 120,000 smallholder farmsteads use VOCs to improve crop performance. In southwestern Kenya, some growers plant maize varieties that, upon detection of egg-laying stemborers, emit VOCs that attract stemborer parasitoids. While these maize varieties have lower yield than common commercial varieties, this intrinsic protection from pests make them attractive to many growers, particularly those who cannot afford commercial seeds and pesticides.

In another application, sub-Saharan African farmers grow their crops alongside companion plant species with VOCs that either repel plant-eating insects or attract their predators. Some companion plant species can also capture nitrogen, control weeds, help crops tolerate drought, or provide food for livestock.

So“Why are VOCs not more intensively used in agriculture for integrated and eco-friendly plant protection?” the researchers ask.

Convincing growers to switch to lower-yielding varieties to cut back on pesticide use is a tough sell. And although laboratory studies show promise, in many cases the approach has not been thoroughly tested in the field. We don’t know how each VOC affects other organisms or ecosystems; for example, one VOC that suppresses the growth of a stone-fruit fungus is also toxic to some stone fruits. According to these researchers, further work is needed to understand how VOCs interact with the plants, insects and microbes of an ecosystem before the technique can successfully expand to different farming locations and systems.

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Such research and expansion might take advantage of breeding or genetic technologies to reintroduce VOC production into high-yielding commercial crop varieties. Alternatively, research could focus on identifying or breeding ideal companion plants that bring the specific benefits needed to a given agro-system. The companion crops best suited to the pests and climactic challenges in sub-Saharan Africa might not be best for other growers around the world. Another option is to expose seedlings to manufactured synthetic VOCs in greenhouses, tricking the seedlings into making insect-deterring molecules before being planted outside.

To encourage integration of VOCs into current farming systems, researchers, growers, breeders and agricultural advisers might build mutually beneficial collaborations with growers who already use VOCs in their agricultural systems. VOCs may not be the solution to plant pest problems, but if the smallholder farmers using them and the researchers studying them are correct, they certainly could be a solution worth pursuing.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/plants-agriculture-vocs-environment-climate/feed/0Becky MackelprangOpinion: To succeed, the Green New Deal must tap the power of collective actionhttps://ensia.com/voices/green-new-deal-collective-action-sunrise-movement/
https://ensia.com/voices/green-new-deal-collective-action-sunrise-movement/#commentsFri, 28 Jun 2019 16:46:02 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=voices&p=26197If you’re paying attention to climate change or politics, you’ve almost certainly heard of the Green New Deal. It’s ambitious. It’s inspiring. It takes on two of the biggest crises of our time — climate change and economic inequality — and proposes a way forward that just might be up to the task of dealing with both. And it calls for transformational change: changing the structure of how a system works. But can it deliver? Based on my research on how to drive transformational change, I think it can. But in order to do so, it needs to continue to gain traction on two key elements that make such change possible. People can feel big change is needed, but the path forward is not clear. The Green New Deal offers a potential path forward. The first key ingredient in transformation is fertile ground — a widespread understanding that things are becoming untenable and something has to change. The timing is ripe in the case of the climate crisis. Massive, global scientific reports on the dangers we face have recently been published (examples here and here), youth climate activism around the world is on the rise, and climate change is becoming an increasingly salient issue for U.S. voters. It’s also ripe with respect to wealth inequality, which is at historic highs in the United States. The success of the Green New Deal will depend on continued and increasing frustration about climate and inequality. In short, people can feel big change is needed, but the path forward is not clear. The Green New Deal offers a potential path forward. Importantly, it starts by asking what is necessary, rather than what seems possible. By definition, transformation means a fundamental change in the system, so asking what is possible in the current system is not a likely path to transformation. The second key ingredient is the presence of a “collective” — a large, intentionally organized group — at the center. Transformative change takes more than an individual, or even a group of individuals. It doesn’t simply capture the imagination of many people; it offers… Read More

If you’re paying attention to climate change or politics, you’ve almost certainly heard of the Green New Deal. It’s ambitious. It’s inspiring. It takes on two of the biggest crises of our time — climate change and economic inequality — and proposes a way forward that just might be up to the task of dealing with both. And it calls for transformational change: changing the structure of how a system works.

But can it deliver? Based on my research on how to drive transformational change, I think it can. But in order to do so, it needs to continue to gain traction on two key elements that make such change possible.

People can feel big change is needed, but the path forward is not clear. The Green New Deal offers a potential path forward.

The first key ingredient in transformation is fertile ground — a widespread understanding that things are becoming untenable and something has to change. The timing is ripe in the case of the climate crisis. Massive, global scientific reports on the dangers we face have recently been published (examples here and here), youth climate activism around the worldis on the rise, and climate change is becoming an increasingly salient issue for U.S. voters. It’s also ripe with respect to wealth inequality, which is at historic highs in the United States. The success of the Green New Deal will depend on continued and increasing frustration about climate and inequality. In short, people can feel big change is needed, but the path forward is not clear.

The Green New Deal offers a potential path forward. Importantly, it starts by asking what is necessary, rather than what seems possible. By definition, transformation means a fundamental change in the system, so asking what is possible in the current system is not a likely path to transformation.

The second key ingredient is the presence of a “collective” — a large, intentionally organized group — at the center. Transformative change takes more than an individual, or even a group of individuals. It doesn’t simply capture the imagination of many people; it offers ways for people to contribute. In a collective, individuals are involved as more than members or employees. They make identity with the collective a core part of who they are and what they do. A collective develops a shared identity around a shared purpose, and can take the grassroots energy bubbling up around an issue and focus it in ways that turns it into powerful transformational work.

The collective at the roots of the Green New Deal is the Sunrise Movement — an American element of a thriving global youth climate movement. The Sunrise Movement grabbed onto the Green New Deal idea and took bold action — most memorably occupying the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the orientation of new members of Congress. Since then, Sunrise has been organizing around the Green New Deal all over the country, recently wrapping up the Road to the Green New Deal Tour that included more than 200 town hall meetings.

Will we, as a nation, rise together to channel the vast resources we have into the collective project of remaking our future in the face of the climate crisis in ways that enable all of us to thrive?

Importantly, the energy and action behind the Green New Deal has grown beyond the Sunrise Movement. The Green New Deal exists at the federal level not as an overly prescriptive policy proposal, but rather as a resolution that balances broad, shared purposes (addressing climate change and economic inequality) with some, but not all, specifics (e.g., fast decarbonization through rapid expansion of renewable energy, building upgrades and energy efficiency combined with millions of good-wage jobs).

At the same time, local- and state-level green new deal proposals also have been introduced around the country. These changes are examples of how the Green New Deal is already changing mainstream conversation and practice. The changes are early evidence of the Green New Deal’s transformative power.

Where to From Here?

But in order to succeed, the collective behind the Green New Deal needs to expand even more. Essentially, the Green New Deal needs to make the leap to shaping the United States into a collective in order to fully realize the plan’s potential for driving transformation.

More specifically, a wider swath of Americans would need to work together as a collective across partisan, racial, economic, geographic and other differences on the shared purpose of addressing climate change and inequality with the necessary urgency the Green New Deal lays out. Importantly, this shared work needs to fully value different people, both in the form of contributions and impacts.

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Given the extreme polarization in American politics, this turn toward more of a collective identity looks like another transformational change. So, the biggest question I have around the success of the Green New Deal is whether we the people are capable of working together in such a way. Will we, as a nation, rise together to channel the vast resources we have into the collective project of remaking our future in the face of the climate crisis in ways that enable all of us to thrive?

The path forward requires both the urgency and scale of ambition of the Green New Deal, and revitalizing the collective identity of Americans as a people who can take on big challenges together. Making progress along this path will be hard — transformational change always is. It will also be uncomfortable, because we need to learn how to work with and value each other in fundamentally different ways.

People will need to prioritize their identity as Americans working together to secure our collective future while keeping the focus on the urgency of addressing climate change and inequality. The Green New Deal has already helped change public debate. The question is, are we capable of delivering on its potential?

Editor’s note: The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Ensia. We present ​them to further discussion around important topics. ​We encourage you to respond with a comment below, following our commenting guidelines, which can be found on this page. ​In addition, you might consider​ ​submitting a Voices piece of your own. See Ensia’s Contact page for submission guidelines.

Kate Knuth was formerly the director of the Boreas Leadership program at the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota, which is where Ensia is based and which provides funding to Ensia. Ensia is an independent publication of IonE. To read more about the relationship between Ensia and IonE, please see our Ethics Statement under the section “RELATIONSHIPS.”

]]>https://ensia.com/voices/green-new-deal-collective-action-sunrise-movement/feed/2Kate KnuthCan smartphone apps help solve the world’s food waste problem?https://ensia.com/features/smartphone-apps-food-waste/
https://ensia.com/features/smartphone-apps-food-waste/#respondWed, 26 Jun 2019 17:35:48 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26160Some 40 percent of America’s food goes uneaten, costing the nation some US$218 billion annually. Food waste is a major contributor to deforestation and water waste, and comes a close second to road transportation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. It accounts for almost 3% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., about the same as 37.4 million passenger vehicles driven over the course of a year. Food waste has become a focus for environmental activists, and the dilemma has inspired a seemingly endless string of apps aimed at reducing it. Harnessing the power of technology to fight food waste may be an attractive approach. The question is, how do these apps hold up in practice? Saving Food, Cutting Emissions Food waste apps cover a wide range of strategies, tackling everything from sharing leftovers, to managing food once it’s purchased, to finding buyers for surplus supermarket produce, to offering diners end-of-day discounts on food remaining at restaurants. Most food-waste-related apps focus on food recovery — that is, salvaging food that would have otherwise been thrown away and distributing it to others. Disturbed by the fact that some 40% of food in United States is thrown away while one in every eight Americans goes hungry, University of California, Berkeley, student Komal Ahmad created Copia, an app that transfers excess food from things like business events to soup kitchens, homeless shelters and food banks. Copia reports it has diverted 1 million pounds (500,000 kilograms) of perfectly good, uneaten food that would have otherwise been landfilled to food-insecure Americans. In Pennsylvania, 412 Food Rescue reports it has saved more than 6 million pounds (3 million kilograms) of food, avoiding 3 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of carbon dioxide production. Food Rescue US, which has 22 sites around the country, reports saving more than 45 million pounds (20 million kilograms) of food in the past eight years. “Ultimately, we’re here to reduce food waste,” says Anoushka Grover, marketing manager for Too Good To Go, an app connecting consumers to restaurants and retailers offering unsold food at a reduced price. “But that translates directly to… Read More

Some 40 percent of America’s food goes uneaten, costing the nation some US$218 billion annually. Food waste is a major contributor to deforestation and water waste, and comes a close second to road transportation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. It accounts for almost 3% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., about the same as 37.4 million passenger vehicles driven over the course of a year.

Food waste has become a focus for environmental activists, and the dilemma has inspired a seemingly endless string of apps aimed at reducing it. Harnessing the power of technology to fight food waste may be an attractive approach. The question is, how do these apps hold up in practice?

Saving Food, Cutting Emissions

Food waste apps cover a wide range of strategies, tackling everything from sharing leftovers, to managing food once it’s purchased, to finding buyers for surplus supermarket produce, to offering diners end-of-day discounts on food remaining at restaurants. Most food-waste-related apps focus on food recovery — that is, salvaging food that would have otherwise been thrown away and distributing it to others.

Disturbed by the fact that some 40% of food in United States is thrown away while one in every eight Americans goes hungry, University of California, Berkeley, student Komal Ahmad created Copia, an app that transfers excess food from things like business events to soup kitchens, homeless shelters and food banks. Copia reports it has diverted 1 million pounds (500,000 kilograms) of perfectly good, uneaten food that would have otherwise been landfilled to food-insecure Americans.

With help from an app that connects extra food with people in need via delivery volunteers, Food Rescue US has kept some 45 million of pounds from being wasted since 2011. Photo courtesy of Food Rescue US

In Pennsylvania, 412 Food Rescue reports it has saved more than 6 million pounds (3 million kilograms) of food, avoiding 3 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of carbon dioxide production. Food Rescue US, which has 22 sites around the country, reports saving more than 45 million pounds (20 million kilograms) of food in the past eight years.

“Ultimately, we’re here to reduce food waste,” says Anoushka Grover, marketing manager for Too Good To Go, an app connecting consumers to restaurants and retailers offering unsold food at a reduced price. “But that translates directly to the amount of [greenhouse gas] emissions we reduce.” Too Good To Go reports it has prevented 40 million kilograms (89 million pounds) in CO2emissions.

Coming Up Short

While such apps have been tremendously helpful in diverting food and spreading awareness of the food-waste issue, they have some downsides, too. For one thing, they don’t address one of the main causes of food waste — societal norms.

“There are cultural expectations that we have about surplus,” says food-security activist Andy Fisher, author of The Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups. “There’s always extra food — you want there to be extra food — you don’t want to run out.”

“Getting food from A to B that’s about to go to waste is good, but wouldn’t it be better to not even have all that extra food to begin with?” asks Jordan Figueiredo, founder of EndFoodWaste.org and the “Ugly” Fruit & Veg Campaign.

Another issue is that there’s just no good way to measure the true impact of these apps in terms of reduced food waste. The companies measure the apps’ success through pounds of food moved. But once the food has been delivered, there’s no way of knowing what happens to it.

“They have no idea how much of the food recovered is actually consumed versus tossed by a food bank or recipient for various reasons,” says Ashley Zanolli, former senior policy and program advisor of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and developer of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Food Is Too Good To Waste toolkit.

Zanolli also notes that, in the case of food donations, 1.2 pounds (0.5 kilograms) is considered a meal by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, regardless of what type of food — or beverage — it is. A company could technically donate 500 pounds (200 kilograms) of sauce and have it count as 417 meals.

“The apps are doing the best they can with calculating social impact; however, there are some serious flaws,” she says.

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Misuse or misunderstanding of the app by clients is a common challenge, as well. Some think food sharing apps offer plate scraps rather than food that remains on the buffet table or in the kitchen. Establishments offering discounted food toward the end of the day are sometimes reluctant to use an app for fear that consumers would wait until closing time to get their favorite foods instead of dining during regular hours. Others are concerned about possible lawsuits (although the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996 protects donors from liability).

But the biggest issue seems to be scaling. Many food-waste apps, particularly those in North America, have limited reach. FlashFood, for instance, is currently only serving Canada and Wisconsin. BuffetGo is available in certain cities in California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York. Food Rescue US has what appears to be the widest reach, spanning 13 states and Washington, D.C.

Another way in which potential impact is limited is that most food-waste apps address food recovery — rerouting surplus food and leftovers from events. Far fewer help restaurants offer end-of-day discounts or address household food-waste issues such as managing perishables, leaving a window of opportunity that’s not being tapped.

Geography is also an issue. These apps work better in urban areas than the suburbs and rural areas because the population is dense, demand for deliveries is high and there are many drivers to make deliveries. As a result, rural areas have proven difficult to reach. To that end, Atlanta, Georgia-based app Goodr is working toward a partnership with UPS to pilot a program that ships food overnight from urban areas to rural food banks and homeless shelters.

“The technological solution for food waste is definitely helpful and apps and software connecting all different kinds of sectors are definitely needed,” says Figueiredo. “But is technology the solution? No, I don’t think it’s the solution.”

Nor, Fisher points out, is food waste redistribution a solution to food insecurity. But until the larger system is fixed, apps may be an important part of closing the gap between abundance and need.

]]>https://ensia.com/features/smartphone-apps-food-waste/feed/0Tiffany R. JansenMost illustrations of the water cycle are missing an important ingredient: People.https://ensia.com/notable/most-illustrations-of-the-water-cycle-are-missing-an-important-ingredient-people/
https://ensia.com/notable/most-illustrations-of-the-water-cycle-are-missing-an-important-ingredient-people/#respondTue, 25 Jun 2019 14:08:34 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26164Some 80% of wastewater worldwide goes back into ecosystems without getting treated for pollution. Human-caused climate change is making droughts more common and water more scarce, threatening to displace tens to hundreds of millions in the next decade. People use water to grow crops, cool power plants, flush toilets and more. And global demand for water keeps climbing, with a projected rise of 20–30% over the next 30 years. But if you just looked at sketches of the water cycle — the diagrams that pop up everywhere from elementary school textbooks to scientific publications — you wouldn’t know about this human impact. In fact, most water cycle diagrams don’t show humans affecting water at all, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience earlier this month by researchers from North America and Europe. Of 464 diagrams from a dozen countries they examined, only 15% depicted humans interacting with water. “Correct depictions of the water cycle will not solve the global water crisis,” the researchers write. But they call for better diagrams as an “important step” toward equitable policy, sustainable development and new ways of thinking at a time when humans are changing the face of the planet. After doing a Google (or Baidu) image search for “water cycle,” the researchers investigated the top 30 results for 12 countries including the U.S., China, India, Mexico, Tunisia and more. They also looked over additional textbooks, scientific articles, government publications and online sources in English. Fewer than 1.5% of those diagrams showed the effects of climate change. Water pollution made an appearance in just 2%. That’s concerning, the researchers contend, since “these diagrams both influence and represent the understanding of researchers, educators and policymakers.” A shift to diagrams that illustrate how human societies relate to oceans, lakes, rivers and groundwater could present a more accurate picture. Water diagrams could also do a better job conveying just how much water is actually available for humans, the researchers argue. None of the diagrams in the review specified what fraction of the water shown could be used within sustainable bounds, nor did any mark the difference between… Read More

Some 80% of wastewater worldwide goes back into ecosystems without getting treated for pollution. Human-caused climate change is making droughts more common and water more scarce, threatening to displace tens to hundreds of millions in the next decade. People use water to grow crops, cool power plants, flush toilets and more. And global demand for water keeps climbing, with a projected rise of 20–30% over the next 30 years.

But if you just looked at sketches of the water cycle — the diagrams that pop up everywhere from elementary school textbooks to scientific publications — you wouldn’t know about this human impact. In fact, most water cycle diagrams don’t show humans affecting water at all, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience earlier this month by researchers from North America and Europe. Of 464 diagrams from a dozen countries they examined, only 15% depicted humans interacting with water.

“Correct depictions of the water cycle will not solve the global water crisis,” the researchers write. But they call for better diagrams as an “important step” toward equitable policy, sustainable development and new ways of thinking at a time when humans are changing the face of the planet.

After doing a Google (or Baidu) image search for “water cycle,” the researchers investigated the top 30 results for 12 countries including the U.S., China, India, Mexico, Tunisia and more. They also looked over additional textbooks, scientific articles, government publications and online sources in English.

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Fewer than 1.5% of those diagrams showed the effects of climate change. Water pollution made an appearance in just 2%. That’s concerning, the researchers contend, since “these diagrams both influence and represent the understanding of researchers, educators and policymakers.” A shift to diagrams that illustrate how human societies relate to oceans, lakes, rivers and groundwater could present a more accurate picture.

Water diagrams could also do a better job conveying just how much water is actually available for humans, the researchers argue. None of the diagrams in the review specified what fraction of the water shown could be used within sustainable bounds, nor did any mark the difference between saltwater lakes and lakes filled with drinkable freshwater. Plus, none of the inspected diagrams noted that 97% of groundwater on Earth is effectively nonrenewable on a timescale of centuries.

In the paper, the authors offer their own diagrams that seek to correct some of the flaws they see in typical depictions of the water cycle. Unlike the standard images they reviewed, the researchers’ version shows renewable and nonrenewable groundwater in different colors, and illustrates how water enters and exits human usage.

This new water cycle diagram includes human impact, a key component neglected by most depictions. Courtesy of Benjamin Abbott. Click to enlarge.

The new diagrams also highlight flows of water from soil moisture, water bodies and pollution — often referred to as green, blue and gray water, respectively — which appeared in only a handful of illustrations assessed in the study. The researchers also created an additional image that covers some of the big ways human impacts interfere with the water cycle, such as land-use change, melting glaciers and flood damage attributable to dams.

There’s no way to know exactly how much the omissions in typical water diagrams affect people’s attitudes and government policy, if at all. But the researchers note that the flaws they’ve found in the diagrams line up with some of the biggest failings in water management, such as neglecting to pay attention to change over time and tending to view water quality and water quantity as separate issues.

Either way, the study illustrates how we can illustrate the water cycle to better represent our changing planet — and the profound ways in which humans are driving that change.

]]>https://ensia.com/notable/most-illustrations-of-the-water-cycle-are-missing-an-important-ingredient-people/feed/0Andrew UrevigHow should climate change be taught in schools across America?https://ensia.com/features/climate-change-education-teachers-schools/
https://ensia.com/features/climate-change-education-teachers-schools/#respondThu, 20 Jun 2019 20:39:56 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=features&p=26135Earth frowns. With a face of green and blue, the planet’s mood is blue, too — as unblinking eyes cast a somber stare. Colored with crayons, this drawing is the schoolwork of Maya, a fifth grader from the United States. At the top sits a title: “Greenhouse Gas Effect.” Piercing Earth’s atmosphere, sharp arrows represent solar radiation, which for the most part remain trapped as heat by a ring of gases aptly shaded green. While a patchwork of flags from around the world makes for a vibrant backdrop, it can’t detract from the dismal mood. To punctuate the point with urgency, there’s a red explosion with all caps in black: “EXTREME!” Even the sun seems sad. Kids like Maya are growing up in a world set to face the worst of climate change. As dire warnings pour out from research scientists and indigenous peoples around the globe, many U.S. teachers don’t mention our planet’s fever in the classroom — and think tanks and fossil fuel companies that deny the scientific consensus on climate promote junk lessons to instructors who do. Yet the education system, like the climate system, is complex. Across the country, from elementary to high school — and from science class to social studies — other teachers are taking the initiative to tackle climate change and other environmental challenges. Middle schoolers in Hawaii survey residents about sea level rise. High school students in Oregon, with help from their teacher, advocate at the state capitol. And elementary kids in New York pick up crayons to illustrate the greenhouse effect. Reputable Sources Maya’s diagram is featured on the website Kids Against Climate Change. The site is run by Kottie Christie-Blick, a teacher at Cottage Lane Elementary School, a public school in New York state. Christie-Blick says students can begin learning about people’s negative impact on the environment by later elementary school. “Teachers are experts at translating the adult world to the child in a way a child can handle,” says Christie-Blick, who plans to soon move from classroom teaching to work full time helping other teachers incorporate climate change into their… Read More

Earth frowns. With a face of green and blue, the planet’s mood is blue, too — as unblinking eyes cast a somber stare.

Colored with crayons, this drawing is the schoolwork of Maya, a fifth grader from the United States. At the top sits a title: “Greenhouse Gas Effect.” Piercing Earth’s atmosphere, sharp arrows represent solar radiation, which for the most part remain trapped as heat by a ring of gases aptly shaded green. While a patchwork of flags from around the world makes for a vibrant backdrop, it can’t detract from the dismal mood. To punctuate the point with urgency, there’s a red explosion with all caps in black: “EXTREME!”

Artwork on the website Kids Against Climate Change shows various interpretations of students’ understanding of climate change. Image courtesy of Kids Against Climate Change

Yet the education system, like the climate system, is complex. Across the country, from elementary to high school — and from science class to social studies — other teachers are taking the initiative to tackle climate change and other environmental challenges. Middle schoolers in Hawaii survey residents about sea level rise. High school students in Oregon, with help from their teacher, advocate at the state capitol. And elementary kids in New York pick up crayons to illustrate the greenhouse effect.

Reputable Sources

Maya’s diagram is featured on the website Kids Against Climate Change. The site is run by Kottie Christie-Blick, a teacher at Cottage Lane Elementary School, a public school in New York state. Christie-Blick says students can begin learning about people’s negative impact on the environment by later elementary school.

“Teachers are experts at translating the adult world to the child in a way a child can handle,” says Christie-Blick, who plans to soon move from classroom teaching to work full time helping other teachers incorporate climate change into their curricula. Even with young students, teachers lead fire drills, discuss “stranger danger” and prepare for the possibility of school shootings. Those issues, she says, are “much scarier to our children than the changing climate.”

For Christie-Blick, teaching climate change is a lens to teach younger students about Earth’s systems, a required topic in New York’s state science standards. Students watch videos, draw pictures, visit websites like NASA Climate Kids, go on a field trip to a recycling center and participate in hands-on activities. In one of her lessons, Christie-Blick says, children place ice above mountains on miniature plastic worlds — then watch as the ice melts, filling up the basin below and flooding the tiny town. This year, her class even took a bus two hours north to meet with a state representative about climate change.

“I do get children who say, ‘My father or my uncle says they don’t believe [in climate change],’” Christie-Blick notes, explaining that in these situations, dozens of ears perk up, waiting to hear how she’ll respond. She says she explains to students that it’s about science, not belief, and that she uses only reputable sources of information such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

For years, Christie-Blick has been involved in the NOAA Planet Stewards Education Project, a federal initiative promoting environmental education. She attended webinars with climate researchers and then completed an action-oriented recycling project with her students.

Before she founded a school in Hawaii, Victoria Newberry left teaching — not once or twice, but three times. While she kept circling back to the profession, she couldn’t stand rote learning and textbooks. “I didn’t feel any connection to the real world and the problems that kids would have to solve,” she says.

That changed in the early 1990s, when she attended a five-day workshop on a new skills-based teaching method called Investigating and Evaluating Environmental Issues and Actions (IEEIA). In the method, developed by teacher educators from Illinois, students choose environmental challenges, investigate them, collect data and propose solutions.

Newberry became a full-time teacher again, using the curriculum for years in a public school on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. A study in the Journal of Environmental Education reported that in 2001, students whose classrooms used the curriculum knew more about ecology and the environment, and scored higher on tests of critical thinking, than those who did not. But Newberry says that after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, mandating more standardized testing in public education, her school’s administration ended the program.

As part of the curriculum at Aka`ula School, students select a local environmental issue, write research questions, collect data and present their findings. Image courtesy of Aka’ula School

Rather than stop teaching with IEEIA, Newberry left the public school system. In 2003, she teamed up with Dara Lukonen, another teacher who used the method, to found Aka`ula School, a private school rooted in the model. Each year, fifth through eighth graders work in small groups to select a local environmental issue, write one or more research questions, and gather data — usually by surveying people on the island about their knowledge and opinions, but sometimes by collecting physical data like water samples. Then they present their findings to, and take questions from, as many as 200 community members.

Student projects have run the gamut of issues: water quality, feral cats, fishing licenses, landfill waste, public bathrooms and more. A few projects have addressed the climate.

“Climate change is a local issue for us,” Newberry says, since rising ocean waters pose a “serious threat” on Molokai. This year, one group of students investigated what residents know about sea level rise and whether they support the state’s recommendations for adapting to it.

Nearly 80% of Aka`ula School’s students are Native Hawaiian, according to Newberry, and researchers and teachers say that part of IEEIA’s success has been its compatibility with students’ cultural values. Peer collaboration syncs with the emphasis traditionally placed on community, while the environmental focus embodies mālama `aina, a traditional Hawaiian concept that Newberry says entails care for the land and sustainability for the future.

“It is not an easy curriculum to teach,” Newberry says. “It is much easier for a teacher to pick up a textbook and say, ‘Read 20 pages and answer 10 questions’ than it is to trust your kids to do the work. But it is so rewarding if you give it a try.”

Research shows that the kids tend to agree. “As young students we feel we have a lot to offer, and we know we can make a difference,” wrote Hina Chow, an eighth grader at the time, in a 2017 school newsletter.

Social Studies and Language Arts

That drive to take action is common in climate change education. “If I’m going to help them understand that there’s a problem,” says Christie-Blick of her elementary schoolers, “I have to help them feel that they have some control and they have some power to do something about it.”

On climate, the urge to do something can get political — fast. While lawmakers in some states are pushing to limit climate education, citing fears that teachers are trying to “indoctrinate or influence students,” other professionals argue that properly teaching about the climate crisis leaves educators with no choice but to dive into the politics, shifting from “climate literacy” to “climate justice.”

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Tim Swinehart, a social studies teacher at Lincoln High School, a public school in Portland, Oregon, has taken class groups to advocate for climate action at the state capitol. He also worked alongside young climate activists to push the Portland school board to pass a resolution banning materials that cast doubt on the reality of global warming — and encouraging climate change curriculum in the classroom.

“I’m often mistaken as a science teacher because I teach about climate change,” says Swinehart. His classes are geography and — now that the resolution has passed — environmental justice. While students and teachers are advocating that the school district more fully implement the climate resolution, he does have enough support to engage students in climate activism.

But not everywhere is Portland. Since few teachers are able to “get their students out of the classroom and into the movement,” Swinehart says, an alternative approach is to “try to bring the movement into the classroom.”

The book contains stories, poems, articles, graphics, role plays and simulations to help teachers address climate justice: not only the scientific evidence for human-driven climate change but the social dimensions, too. In a simulation called the Thingamabob Game, students play the role of CEOs at major manufacturing corporations, working to maximize their profit — all while producing new “thingamabobs” drives carbon dioxide levels up.

Another lesson in the book is the Climate Change Mixer. Students act as people around the world, learning how climate change affects different groups including farmers, activists, political figures, oil executives and indigenous people.

“[I]t was highly effective because our primary learning goal was for students to be able to understand the consequences of climate change, and this activity enabled them to gain a basic understanding of how people throughout the world are impacted by climate change,” Brett Benson, a history teacher in Omaha, Nebraska, wrote in an email to Ensia. Benson used the activity with some 160 high-school students as “hook” for an assignment over the following days in which students analyzed and wrote short essays on documents related to the consequences of climate change.

While those lessons are geared toward high-school students, Natalie Stapert wondered if she could bring some of them to her middle schoolers. That thought spawned an effort to redesign the sixth-grade humanities curriculum at the Lowell School, a private school in Washington, D.C., where Stapert is a teacher and language arts and social studies coordinator.

Lowell’s new sixth-grade humanities curriculum incorporates activities like the Thingamabob Game and the Climate Change Mixer — slowed down to work for younger students, with more time for background knowledge and vocabulary — and is centered around reading novels, such as Exodus and A Long Walk to Water, that touch on climate and environmental themes. Students also conduct hands-on experiments, developed by the California-based Mobile Climate Science Labs, to learn about the greenhouse effect. And they take an overnight field trip to the Chesapeake Bay’s Tangier Island, which is threatened by rising sea levels.

“We did not approach it from a climate activism standpoint,” says Stapert. While many of the school’s teachers and students have begun taking action since learning more about the issue, the initial impetus was student learning. The old sixth-grade curriculum, a traditional social studies class focused on world cultures and geography, wasn’t engaging all of the kids.

“We looked for opportunities for the learning to be more meaningful so that they would have more internal motivation to work hard and enhance their skills,” Stapert says.

In developing the curriculum, school leaders consulted with NOAA; CLEAN; Climate Generation, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that focuses on climate change solutions; and other organizations.

A new paper in the journal Environmental Education Research, to which Stapert contributed, suggests that sixth graders have higher reading scores and climate literacy after they go through the curriculum. Stapert cautions that it’s difficult to draw direct causal links, and the paper itself notes that the small sample size renders the effect statistically insignificant — but it provide a foundation for future study.

The curriculum also includes discussion of new ideas and information about climate solutions from businesses and scientists, as well as a field trip to talk to lawmakers. Stapert says that these efforts stop the topic from becoming too overwhelming by helping students “understand that when they act, things get better.”

Make the World a Rainbow

Even the youngest students can take action. Christie-Blick recounts the origin of her website, Kids Against Climate Change, recalling a hot day in June near the end of one school year. After learning about climate change, her fifth-grade students weren’t content to skip to summer break.

Student artwork on the website Kids Against Climate Change varies from somber to hopeful. Image courtesy of Kids Against Climate Change

“The kids said, ‘We need to get this out on the internet,’” Christie-Blick says. She agreed, and the students went to work, drawing pictures and making videos. Several years later, the site offers a list of resources for teachers, hosts student artwork and serves as a climate change discussion forum for students.

With funding from NOAA, the site is free to use, and Christie-Blick moderates all of the comments. Each page ends with hundreds of comments from kids, identified by first name and country. “I think we should stop polluting so we can slow down climate change,” writes Ferenc.

“One way that kids can help to stop climate change is to use bikes instead of cars,” writes Laila. “Cars let out a lot of carbon dioxide.”

The site is where Maya’s drawing of the greenhouse effect, complete with a sad sun and frowning Earth, is featured. But it’s also home to symbols of hope. As students learn about not just the causes and impacts of climate change, but also the actions they can take — individually or politically — to make a difference, they can find optimism. In one colorful piece of art, for example, an elementary student from the U.S. named Sofia shares her simple call to action: “If we work together we can slow down climate change and make the world a rainbow.”

]]>https://ensia.com/features/climate-change-education-teachers-schools/feed/0Andrew UrevigResearchers recommend chemistry educators focus more on environmental impactshttps://ensia.com/notable/chemistry-education-sustainability/
https://ensia.com/notable/chemistry-education-sustainability/#respondWed, 19 Jun 2019 17:53:53 +0000http://ensia.com/?post_type=notable&p=26118Think chemistry classes should be all about balancing chemical equations and memorizing the periodic table? Think again. In a paper published last month in Nature Sustainability, researchers from North America and Western Europe recommend that educators put chemistry in context by devoting more time to how the discipline affects society and the environment. Take, for example, the Haber-Bosch process, which reacts nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from natural gas to create ammonia — an essential ingredient in many of the fertilizers used to grow the crops that feed the world. Chemistry curricula almost always mention this process, the study says, but rarely cover how immensely important it is in global agriculture. Getting even less attention? Overproduction of ammonia. Companies now create so much of the chemical that nitrogen pollution is a real threat to waterways and nitrogen production a real contributor to the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Chemistry, the researchers say, has long focused on “creating new products and materials” without considering how those products and materials will affect environmental systems. The authors, who are members of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s task force on Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education, contend that until chemistry classes cover issues like this, students won’t get the full picture. The solution? The researchers recommend that chemistry educators make sustainability a central theme of their classes, adopting a “systems thinking” approach that examines how the effects of chemical reactions ripple out into social and environmental systems in complex ways. That Haber-Bosch process, for example, is deeply intertwined with environmental frameworks such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in multiple ways. While ammonia fertilizer relates to the objectives of ending hunger and poverty, overproduction is a threat to life on land, life underwater and clean water sources for humans. Students, the authors posit, should hear about these implications as well as about the process itself. Similarly, the study says, students could apply chemical principles to explore the implications of greenhouse gas production instead of just studying scientific gas laws outside of their real-world context. Some groups have taken practical steps to bring these ideas… Read More

Think chemistry classes should be all about balancing chemical equations and memorizing the periodic table? Think again.

In a paper published last month in Nature Sustainability, researchers from North America and Western Europe recommend that educators put chemistry in context by devoting more time to how the discipline affects society and the environment.

Take, for example, the Haber-Bosch process, which reacts nitrogen from the air with hydrogen from natural gas to create ammonia — an essential ingredient in many of the fertilizers used to grow the crops that feed the world. Chemistry curricula almost always mention this process, the study says, but rarely cover how immensely important it is in global agriculture.

Chemistry, the researchers say, has long focused on “creating new products and materials” without considering how those products and materials will affect environmental systems. The authors, who are members of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s task force on Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education, contend that until chemistry classes cover issues like this, students won’t get the full picture.

The solution? The researchers recommend that chemistry educators make sustainability a central theme of their classes, adopting a “systems thinking” approach that examines how the effects of chemical reactions ripple out into social and environmental systems in complex ways.

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That Haber-Bosch process, for example, is deeply intertwined with environmental frameworks such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in multiple ways. While ammonia fertilizer relates to the objectives of ending hunger and poverty, overproduction is a threat to life on land, life underwater and clean water sources for humans. Students, the authors posit, should hear about these implications as well as about the process itself.

Similarly, the study says, students could apply chemical principles to explore the implications of greenhouse gas production instead of just studying scientific gas laws outside of their real-world context.